by Philip Wylie
On the corner of Flagler Street, a newsman, hard faced, bull lunged, yelled his version of the afternoon’s headlines:
“Woman rumored found in Cape Town, South Africa! Willowy blonde discovered, report says! Alive and in good health! Read all about it!” His voice throbbed and echoed in the quiet streets. Between his shouts, the twitter of birds sounded clearly.
A few men bought papers but in the expression of none was any sign of such excitement or hope as might have been expected. The men of the world had first wearied and finally despaired of “rumors” of a woman found. Usually they were inventions of bored journalists in far places. Sometimes they were the beginning of sordid tales, tales about quacks and liars who claimed to have a woman on display and charged admission and who, perhaps, were later lynched by an investigating, disillusioned mob. On occasion the “discoveries” had concerned hermaphrodites; but it had been found, long ago, that all such had spontaneously reverted to masculinity at the instant of the Vanishing.
Gaunt bought a paper—but not to read about the rumored woman. That headline but made him think with a dreary hopelessness of Edwin and his quest; the hard effort to get news and the ultimate, resigned acceptance of his son’s loss, long ago, in New Guinea.
He found a place in the shade and he, like the others, leaned against a building.
The front page was largely concerned with government orders, new bureaucratic laws and plans for the resumption of some service or other. Foreign news, on an inside page, told of a revolt in Hungary and of the burning of public buildings by an “Anti-Sex Party”
which resented the lowering of general morality. The insurrection had been put down with machine guns.
He heard a murmur in the distance. A half dozen homosexuals, or “G-boys” as they were called, came chattering and laughing up the street. The “Girl-Boys” traveled in little bands. Alone, they were liable to different kinds of assault: assault by men made lustful by the sight of lipstick, powder, dresses and the synthetic female shape, or by men enraged at such a spectacle. The G-boys minced past Gaunt, who gazed at them with eyes at once somber and repelled. Whistles and catcalls showered from the shady places along the thoroughfare.
A lone cop, walking his tiresome beat in the damp warmth, stared stonily at the G-boys. He was not allowed to arrest them, any more, except for flagrant exhibitionism.
They were too numerous. Amongst them were men who had been important citizens, rich citizens, men with position and power, men of all ages. Besides, many who didn’t dress as girls, many who ignored all such human travesty, “decent,” “normal” men in pre-Disappearance days, had changed their attitudes, their behavior.
Conscious of the universal attention paid them, the G-boys went on, smirking and smiling, rolling their eyes, winking, flirting, waving handkerchiefs. Two or three bystanders accosted them. The girlish group stopped and giggled. From it rose the sound of tenor and baritone voices with female accents and intonations. Presently the whole group went into an open bar. Someone had offered to buy them a drink—picked them up—and the masquerade of femininity departed from the thoroughfare.
Miami steeped in high noon. A little wind stirred papers and rubbish on the dirty sidewalks. Sun sluiced hazily down thousands of unwashed windows and myriad pastel walls from which, already, faded paint was peeling.
Gaunt folded his newspaper, took a pencil from his pocket, and began to check a list, using the paper for backing. Perhaps, he thought, that was why he had bought it.
Trips to the city from his house involved sixteen to twenty miles of driving and consumed a good deal of gasoline. It was necessary to make every mile count. The list said:
Haircut
Gas and oil
Meat
Aspirin
Tooth paste, powder, etc.
Shoes?
Watch repaired?
Typewriter ribbons
Send telegram WH
Call on anybody? Connauth? Ableson? Weaver?
He compared the list with his undependable recollection of items needed and items running short. Then, heaving a sigh, he reexamined his ration tickets, credit number cards, travel blanks, special permits, identity certificate and other papers currently associated with shopping. They seemed to be in order.
Briskly now, compared with the general pace, he started up Flagler Street. First, he showed his communications permit and sent the wire which informed the White House that his report of the investigative projects was about three-quarters finished. In the telegram he used no clearly comprehensible key words.
Thus Tateley’s inquiry into solar, planetary, spatial and cosmic conditions prevailing at the moment of Disappearance was known as PROJECT ETHER.
Steadman’s biological inquiries into the possibility that the Disappearance might have been implicit in cells and tissue (an instantaneous, gasifying cancer, someone had suggested in a lengthy paper) and into the possibility of growing human embryos in mammalian uteri, flasks or test tubes (though where and how to find or create the starting ovum was an apparently hopeless problem) went under the respective names of OPERATION PROTOPLASM and OPERATION PROTOPROTOPLASM.
Bob Blake’s teams, investigating at every atomic and subatomic level, were engaged in what was known (among the knowing) as PROJECT x.
The young clerk at Western Union was awed by the address on Gaunt’s wire and careful to check every word and letter: people were arrested quickly for carelessness, these days, where official matters were concerned. . . .
The typewriter ribbons proved easy, to Gaunt’s relief. Little things of that sort were in uncertain supply and to be without them was sometimes to cease functioning altogether.
There was no meat.
His watch was not yet ready. It had been promised, but the repairman said he was behind schedule. Gaunt felt undue wrath—he often did, these days—and found himself
“pulling rank” on the bent, mustached, unhappy watchmaker. “Look here! I’m on the NTS Board, that’s the National Technical Survey Board, in case you don’t know, and I need my watch to carry out my duties!”
“I’ll sit up tonight! Deliver it? I have a bicycle!”
Gaunt’s irritation vanished as it had come, quickly, and was replaced by another emotion: “Oh, hell! We all feel the same way! Take your time! I’ll stop by again in a week or so. Sorry to be mean about it!”
Small, grateful blue eyes looked up at him. “Thank you, sir.”
Tooth paste, but not his customary brand. Aspirin. “Anything else, Dr. Gaunt?”
the druggist asked. “Barbiturates? Hard times for sleep! Codeine? A few quarter grains of morphine? Dangerous days.”
Gaunt’s surprise was evident.
The druggist leaned over his counter so the other customers would not hear. “New ruling. With the doctors having to do nursing as well as medicine and surgery, with transportation so poor, we’ve been instructed on the q. t. to make drugs available to responsible people. Naturally, we don’t intend to supply addicts. But for men like yourself who are capable of caring for their neighbors, giving first aid, treating minor things, it saves sending for a doctor, who probably wouldn’t get there anyhow.”
“I see,” Gaunt replied.
“Sulfas, penicillin, aureomycin, and so on. I’ve fixed up at least twenty customers who have good judgment with outfits that can handle anything from an acute appendix—
with the molds—to a fracture.”
“How much?” It was an expected question. The druggist shrugged. “A simple kit—ten dollars. A complete kit in a suitcase, seventy-five dollars.”
“I’ll pick up a suitcase on my way back to my car. It wouldn’t be a bad idea. God knows what a man will want in the days ahead!”
Gaunt did not need shoes—yet. But he had neglected, for the past two years, to keep his stock of footgear at its usual level. His brown brogues were badly worn. His
“best” black shoes were cracking across the instep. Since May he had been intermittently visi
ting shoe stores. Immediately after the Disappearance, shoes had been looted; they were for a time nearly as scarce as women. Shoes were coming back now; but Gaunt was waiting for their quality to improve.
At Bosterman’s he found nothing but cloth and suede.
At Kallan’s, cordovan shoes, not well made.
At Bloom’s Shoe Mart he was offered, for fifty dollars, brogues manufactured before the catastrophe, near-duplicates of his worn-out pair. They were black market. He wrestled with his conscience and decided he could wait.
He had his hair cut.
The barbershop floor was unswept, the bib used on Gaunt was soiled, no tissue or towel protected him from its greasy folds, and the barber’s instruments were unsterilized.
Gaunt sat finickily in the chair and listened to dirty jokes and uproarious laughter.
Nowadays, many men went to barbershops simply to hear and to participate in such talk.
Gaunt listened indignantly. Jim Elliot, revolted by the salacity of barbershops, had already taken to cutting Gordon’s hair and his own,—with two mirrors. Gaunt thought that, the next time, he would emulate his lawyer friend.
When he left the barbershop, the sight of a crowd of men in front of the windows of a department store caused him to turn his head to the right, with the result that a man approaching him from the left collided with him.
“Sorry,” said Gaunt.
The voice that came to his ears shook with rage. “You’re damned rooting-tooting you’re sorry! Why don’t you look where you’re going?”
Gaunt wheeled. The man was middle-aged, big-bellied, thick-armed and trembling with exaggerated response: the collision had done him no damage but his fury kindled, in the philosopher, an equally abnormal anger. “It takes two people not looking where they’re going, to collide.”
“Oh. A wise guy!”
Gaunt calmed quickly. “Skip it.”
“I skip nothing!” said the man childishly—and he swung at the philosopher.
The blow caught Gaunt on the shoulder. Before he knew what he was doing, he swung in return and felt his fist push into the gristle of the man’s nose. It was a rewarding sensation.
The nose began to bleed, its owner, to weep. He stood there, trickling crimson, sobbing. “It hurts,” he moaned.
Gaunt was overcome by contrition. He took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and handed it over. “I’m sorry. Sorry. . . !”
The man shrugged and walked back in the direction from which he had come.
Temper that rose from an absolute and insatiate hunger, an utter frustration, and an inner loneliness . . . temper which made the presence of men, and of only men, a constant source of bursts of violence. The papers hardly bothered, any more, to run the police court reports of blows, grapplings, stabbings, even meaningless shootings. Every man knew why such things happened because nearly every man had the same sensations.
Gaunt stood awhile on the sunny side of the street wondering if he ought to follow the fat man—grieving—making up his mind to prepare a discipline of himself, henceforward, so that whenever he walked in public he would be restrained before any provocation. He would be able to say, no matter what happened, It’s just the temper of these days. Forget it.
He decided to see what held the interest of the crowd. It could be anything. A man with a monkey. A man playing a violin. A fight. A vendor of lewd photographs.
Anything.
Even on its fringes, the crowd smelled sweaty.
It was an old, unwashed sweatiness, a stagnant smell, with underodors of rancidity and sickly sweet putrescences.
Where was the incentive to wash? And soap was short. He pushed among the men, the dirty T-shirts, the smudged, bare arms, the soiled linen and occasional seedy jackets. They faced a row of department store show windows and in these Gaunt saw a number of mannequins. Female mannequins. His thought at the moment was concentrated wryly on the fact that his own jacket had a torn pocket, his trousers bore coffee stains, and he, too, beyond doubt, exuded the smell of a hot day even though he had bathed in the morning.
There was nothing new about the display of mannequins in store windows. If even remotely lifelike, they invariably drew an audience of desultory males. These, however, were not leftovers from pre-Disappearance days. They were new and different and it was no wonder the men ogled, stirred restlessly, talked in excited tones.
Along the top of the windows was a large sign:
THE NEW MISS AMERICA DOLLS-COME IN FOR A DEMONSTRATION
Amongst the “dolls,” on metal rests, were other signs.
The dolls were life size. They had realistic hair—perhaps some had real hair.
They were molded and painted to resemble nature as accurately as possible. Some were nude and some were dressed. The nude ones revealed, at a glance, that no detail of female structure had been overlooked. Their substance, Gaunt saw, was some sort of foam plastic which, he did not doubt, had a texture as similar to that of flesh as technologists could make it. From the heels of these huge dolls, electric cords ran to outlets.
For a moment, Gaunt was puzzled. Then a clerk stepped into one of the show windows and snapped switches. Several of the dolls began to dance and gyrate like hula maidens. From a loudspeaker outside the window came a throaty, voluptuous voice that sounded female.
“I love you very much, darling,” it said. “Don’t be afraid of me. Put your arms around me . . . there! . . . that’s better—!”
Gaunt read the placards:
“These Miss America Dolls are a complete, mechanical simulation of living womanhood. Any perfume selected by the purchaser may be atomizer permeated into the material of the dolls. A variety of love-languorous, talking-doll records are available to simulate speech. The dolls are electrically warmed with a thermostatic adjustment to maintain normal body temperature or even simulate an exciting fever. They are light, supple and pliable. Motorized dolls capable of reproducing a wide variety of dance (!) steps are now on sale. The dolls come in three sizes, large, medium and small. Hair coloring and other details to suit the purchaser’s choice. Prices range from three hundred dollars up.”
Another said:
“Why be alone? A Miss America Doll is the next best thing to a real sweetheart!
Take one home with you now! She will end the sleeplessness of your nights. She will divert, entertain and satisfy you, keeping alive your memory through the Famine Period.
She will talk to you as women talk—and she won’t talk back!”
Another:
“Price too high? Form a syndicate with your friends. A Miss America Doll is
“wife enough” for a dozen! Think of it!”
Gaunt thought of it.
With many emotions—revulsion, disgust, enraged mirth, a sense that this was truly obscene. He thought of Connauth and thought that perhaps Connauth’s planned crusade should have been carried out, after all. “Motorized rubber women!” he said to himself.
And at the same time, because he was an honest man, he realized these undulating, lush-talking dummies had a fascination too, in all they so completely brought back to the memory. He wondered what Paula would have said about such articles, such a display. Probably that the dolls would make better wives than a lot of women. Paula would say that, not exactly meaning it, but implying the inadequacies of so many of her sex.
His accurate perception of the wry manner in which his wife would probably respond gave rise to further thoughts which were soon substantiated by the emergence from the store of a man carrying one of the dolls. The crowd made jubilant way for him, sniggering, cheering-half sardonically but half as primitives might have cheered that other brave person who ate the first oyster and proved it was good food.
The pioneer purchaser was short and thick at the waist. He had big, bland eyes and a motile, mucilaginous mouth which he kept licking as he lugged his burden, a doll taller than himself in a yellow semitransparent evening dress, beneath which black underwear could be seen. He squeezed his doll si
gnificantly. The crowd laughed. He put a nubile doll arm around his neck. The laughter increased. He made certain further explicit gestures and winked and went on to a parked car where he tenderly seated the
“woman” in the place next to the one he would occupy. He walked around the car, stepped into it, patted the doll, and drove away.
What Gaunt considered then was related to Paula’s imagined comment: not that the dolls were “better” wives than some once-living counterparts but that, to many men, a wife was little more than such an object as these dolls.
Men of that sort were allured by the externals. Their response to the opposite sex was limited to physical sensations. They chose a mate according to criteria of eye and ear and nose and touch. They married not a personality—a mind, a cultural entity, a bundle of genes, ideas or a soul—but a blue-eyed blonde with a good figure and a low voice who used a perfume called Détroyez-moi. They took her home and dressed her up as seductively as purse and taboo allowed. Their “love” was confined to using her as an erotic toy. Quite often, the better she complied the more likely the spouses were to extend the range of their erotic toying. Often, too, such a wife’s not unnatural opinion that she was more than mechanical lust-putty led her to resentment. Again, and most often of all, when the girlish rectitude of her upbringing prevented a woman from joining even in the rudiments of a good bedfellowship, both she and her miserable husband became embodiments of a general resentment—against each other, life, and the wide world. In this last, both spouses were self-cheated even of such stimuli as dolls furnished, dolls with perfused scent, recorded love-patter, and motorized pelvises.
Indeed, Gaunt went on thinking, as he walked back toward the parking yard, to get a live woman who could, among other attainments, approximate the values and advantages of the dolls was more than most Americans could hope for.
And even when they were successful, another element soon supravened: excepting for the physical differences of size and color and smell (and, possibly, motorization), the dolls and the doll-like women were interchangeable; they could not be told apart; hence they were monotonous as individuals and monotonous as a group. A man seeking to escape he knew not what insatiety (since he would hardly recognize his own limitations as the cause of his tedium) could clasp a hundred such ert bodies without surcease-and would likely try to do so.