Or ask what a modulus is, Amy—a constant, expressing like a steady fraction of itself how much a certain property is possessed of something, or a constant factor—a multiplier! for the conversion of units from one system to another (yes?). Or Amy ask to be made to laugh because the last time Amy came—the last time you came, Amy—one felt in the hand a mixed feeling, a tender chill and in the gray-green eyes something put in place of something else, and she wished to know how well one knew Jim Mayn, politely anxious, not just trouble-at-work but, in the line between what showed and what didn’t, a void or nerve (of fear?) which one could not figure, just as, to be frank with oneself, one hesitated to broach the question of sex.
And so between the propensity to save what has happened to one yet to spend it, one found oneself so close to one’s blonde twenty-three-year-old potential girlfriend far from the harsh junta’s bulletin of progress toward independence, found oneself telling her a tale of the long day—como le va el dia? how goes it?—dreaming for Amy’s entertainment that one memorable long day—when the new network of the mixed market mechanism seemed to go haywire or beyond itself joining what, among random appointed curves, had not been seen to be connected. For the Chief himself on some royal and ancient green with just the shadow of satisfaction in his frown that somewhere his advisers are handling the economy as a strict father balances his family budget—purses his lips and bends over his makable putt. He has, he thinks, stepped secretly inside his own production-possibility frontier to let the world slide on without him while he takes a bit of recreation. But he does not know what lies baleful between the putter’s ridged-steel face, the dimpled ball, and the cup no Secret Service could have thought to check out beforehand.
And so the Chief starts the ball rolling along a curve he has foreseen for the ball should break left; yet some presence is missing, he must ask his advisers, some gravity—for long before he can send the ball on its way, a "big board" (they nostalgically call it—a big board down Wall Street way) has so previewed this event through sequences that can yield it that the Chief and this event have been pre-established as actual. Now, this "big board" (which actually has almost nothing in common with the old Stock Exchange) is neither one board nor a board. Instead it is a new global network constantly creating itself in numbers, template curves, possible consequences, and desirable equilibriums, as the locus of all Congruences filling the mixed-market mechanism. That one-time mystery which Smith had said to leave alone and Keynes had said to intervene in now by its mutual Mind constantly projects its own destined Congruence which at each "big board" center is all plugged in but actually more conceptual to the touch; do you see, Amy? Each misnamed "big board," then, is not at all two-dimensional except in samples momentarily abstracted for experiment—say, the effect of womanpower relocation-and-job-training plans on the stubborn Phillips curve that ties decreasing unemployment to wage hikes—not two-d but a system that predicts and that is known by those who know it best as a field of all possible curves whose constant changes occupy like a position that roughly resembles a headless, torso-less human form, armed and legged, a four-d field of intersections always but secretly mindful both of the crossings of such old slopes as the Demand and Supply, and the absolute refusal to cross one or another of the curves (or schedules) that compose an Indifference Map—
an Indifference Curve showing one’s inability to choose between, say, dinner with one’s mother at a feminist restaurant and six holes of golf with one’s father, or two such meals and eighteen holes, and so on; or, along another Indifference Curve, one’s inability to choose between one pro basketball game at the Garden and the promise of one phone call from Amy, or two games and an actual call, or four games and a call in which one consistently interests Amy even in the name and address of someone else, an older man, a journalist whose relative substitution value may be greater because since he may travel to any point on the globe at an hour’s notice he tends to be scarcer than oneself. On this future day, then, the "big board" constantly reconstituting itself all over the globe, simultaneously reaching every direction with mutations potentially infinite yet hugging the Earth’s globe of flat horizons, outdoes itself, transactivates its parts to plot a collaborative global act by which both Gravity and Government are divided by both Agency and Anarchy.
One’s father peers through the wall of the next room and through the back or crack of one’s head trying to shine the hint that one take a two-hour break—an economic pause—from all this homeboundwork to "take in" (one predicts he will say) "a flick." He cannot envision much less see the dark-eyed blonde who hears only one, not him.
Now normally these electronic models plugged in to one another across the nuclear family of nations rule the mixed markets by foreseeing the multiple effects upon, say, Velocity of Money or upon the Global Consumption curves, of any event such as a drop if not a plunge in steel or water production or a local change of Mind. Amy, where is your heart, your hand?—this system devised by forethought beside itself, which controls, say, the arms while seeming to leave free the hands and digits, has so impressed the multinational oligopolists with themselves that they think to transcend those wise Quakers who are said to have gone to the New World to do good and ended up doing well, and they have ceded to the new system a strange measure of what would otherwise have been the Business-as-Usual Profit, fifty-five percent on a new transcontinental Third-World Sewer, one hundred percent on turning surplus soy into air, five hundred on a compact laundropod for nuclear waste. All such foregone! foregone! Forget the Phillips curve—the period’s competitive but transcapitalist. This global grapevine and decision system forestalls the old demand-pull inflation in which a certain curve goes too far and spending exceeds what the economy can come up with; and at the same time the parallel concept is available in the economatriculating templates of the system’s constant Future—namely, it forestalls any ghastly increase of Money, hence of MV in the exchange equation Money times Velocity of Circulation equals Average Price Level times real GNP—for as Rail says to a class suddenly still but for the mixed whisper of pencils and ballpoints chasing him along blue notebook lines, in this type of old-fashioned inflation too much money chases too few goods.
But wait—in a future where buyers’ inflation would be only an all-too-easily-contained beginning, this simul-system, Amy, this world manifold of instant models filled with instant information, can be trusted to expose and defense against cost-push (sellers’) inflation too. Here wages get forced up by unions despite widespread unemployment, so employers raise consumer prices before the worker’s spouse with five extra bucks in her purse consumed with what is to be next grabs someone else’s pushcart and starts down the aisle to the strains of free music. But this inflation, like other mishaps including unemployment itself, can’t happen under the new mutual controls; and while some argue that all the foreseeable futures created by the conceptual templates in conjunction with the vast input of productivity data, infra-red photos of rivers and mountains, and weather-satellite prediction have turned not only a mixed economy into a steady state but life itself into economics, still the system contains not so many future threats as it itself might have been expected to foresee and may be prey mainly to a normal human desire (in some people) not to see what’s coming.
And this globe-net of centers engrosses from Capetown to Kansas City, Brussels to Kyoto to Santiago, all data which the econometric projections and new random models embrace while registering results of events so fast that within certain templates of right-to-know publicity-pattern—and so in the minds of many—the events-to-come have come already, do you see, Amy? (You, for whom one’s fantasies may never be translated out of one’s right brain onto whatever handicapped digital screen; you, whose research in your real daily salaried job yields research that will help, say, cerebral-palsy victims speak and learn with a richness and rapidity heretofore impeded if not just bleeped off and schlonked out by the honchos of the industry who have been more interested in the first tw
o days of birth-defect kids than in the void of boredom and solitary confinement that yawns out like an expanding universe for disabled unknown veterans of the theater of debut, Amy.) So, then, a given new model of consumer behavior, or model of models, may embrace, say, first, such events as, say, these three: may embrace, Amy, first, the impending takeoff of a plane containing pre-flattened, mildly yellowed, but cute orphans from a point in Asia; second, may embrace the plane of plate glass fronting a long, narrow, moderately multinational feminist health-food restaurant where a lean and hungry, hard-to-read young man whose pale, jutting chin contains two subtle scar points of what the mujer with him abruptly calls acne, and whose thoughts (he is aware) undergo breathtaking transformations, sits eating his companion’s sesame roll and butter and facing over his menu a depth of field which embraces both the glimmering plate glass twenty feet away like a lid upon the longish, noisy, aromatic restaurant room, the older woman opposite him who is asking him what he’s having for dessert and is herself torn between two desserts, and on the other side of the glass as if in a next room furnished with an orange compact car, a parking meter, and a hydrant, three persons, two women and a man, who appear bent on destruction; and may embrace, third, meanwhile, hours away, the Chief, who, having lined up his putt, grins, shakes his head, estimates the slope and the break, and with a rhythm that is all sensitivity, putts.
The jets of Operation Adoption somewhere in Asia whine down the curve foreshadowed by the rich click shared between presidential ball and club face, while for the multinational eater, about to be pressure-cooked by means of not sealing but of breaching the gasket-bedded lid, what matters is the parallel, staggered trajectories of bomb and fire and bullet to be launched from the three outside, not that these curves actually come from the projections loomed template upon template by the housework of a system as if its thinking has rewired the world. But to take second things for a second first, where are these events coming from? The system has surveyed Asiatic futures to see what best return can be had from the long-term but now terminated overseas investment there of machines, material, men, bombs, and, more vital, demolition knowhow: what return will be suitable on such an investment? Friendship with those who have been ploughed had been run through the conceptual templates, likewise an agribusiness feedback and cultural exchange such as music and dance groups and eastern theories of peace cum Buddhist child care; but the only future seeming both to approach the desired congruence with the original input and simultaneously counteract certain domestic trends like guilt and the decline of marriage is a transfer of orphans which will fill a near-unquantifiable lag or gap or absence. Yet the system’s economy is to multiply consequences both in scatter-parallel and sequence (like alternatives in sentencing the convict to concurrent or consecutive death penalties or other terms) and the system foresees an East-West secret junta so dead set against the orphan solution, so certain this substitute is not the destined congruence of prior investments, that it must liquidate the moderately yellowed, pre-flattened contents of the plane as a counter act.
Elsewhere the steel industries will have agreed that with the decreasing leverage of unions a few union leaders still powerful because early in the game they were foresighted enough to diversify themselves will succeed in urging a certain bloc of workers that the compounding of steel-substitute and rubber-substitute production, whereby (though only a few know which) either rubber-sub will be made from steel-sub or steel-sub from rubbber-sub, is destined to make the industries so much more invulnerable that unions’ traditional interest in getting a bigger wedge of the pie within the newly stabilized economy where durable-goods sectors no longer show cyclical swings has no more chance now than a chronic slump or for that matter one Indifference Curve to cross another.
Therefore, since the Chief Executive (drawing triangle deltas on a pad to represent the finite increments within his variable putt and his invariable program) will be inclined—can be foreseen—to certify with a very slight hike in steel prices an experimental temporary downturn-to-come in the economy; and since increased prices will not affect demand, so the coefficient of demand elasticity for the products in question is virtually unity, as seen in the influential equation (good for elasticity of supply or demand); and since armament futures are sticky if not in a state of international instability over the effect of these events on mutual exports; and since new domestic disturbances, some even within union families where wives tend to be non-union and work harder for less money, put unions (even marriage) in an all-time popularity trough—the system conceives an explosive resolution to the moderate pressures bearing against the new stability: a dramatic assassination traceable to those in the hire of union honchos and international forces, dependent both upon a substance which (active for no more than five minutes after exposure to the air) explodes when touched by a golf ball that has been in contact with, in this order, a steel-faced putter and a stretch of Bermuda grass, and upon the Chief Executive’s habit of sinking putts only of such short distance that the consequent explosion in the eighteenth hole can comfortably reach him.
Elsewhere, a model restaurant contains, among twelve tablefuls of women plus (and including) a complement of men, two former golf widows, two known underground journalists—man and woman—getting an underground interview with a distinguished but generally unknown South American economist-in-exile who, consenting to be approached, had picked this spot because of his absent wife who knows of it in turn because of two new women friends who know and admire the proprietors who, through many turns, are a couple no longer divorced from each other having reopened a marriage if not a barricade supplied in part by the man’s lucrative lobby against toxic fertilizers including some from South America, and in part by the woman’s organic farm in Dutchess County snatched with a windfall from stock in a body-scan company bought and unloaded during the ten months of her divorce—my divorce, she says; my divorce, he says. Now, sets of sequence set in motion by the global system can break down, and the bombing of the restaurant now so vividly envisioned as to be actual seems in its train of causes—a new Invisible Hand—to be as much too fast to follow as it now seems deliberate, while diners reach gently for a second half-piece of crumbly stone-ground bread or, on a consumer’s whim, some broccoli tart or an earthenware vessel of spring water—or nod and nod and go on slowly munching while on the other side of the plane of glass the three plotters having been so actually plotted along the template curves of the global prediction sequences sidle by the still furniture of the street outside.
Yet if the system has outdone itself by projecting these three events congruent less with the "handiness" of Adam Smith’s old-fashioned limb the Invisible Hand than with its twin trait of being as out of sight as the old and ancient system behind big-board stock exchanges, it yields still in its own until-now unforeseen precreation a mind-blowing safeguard. For having projected instantly a consequence so real as to be actual, the system hence provides itself, to its own actual surprise, with both base and time for countervailing action backward from the projected future which has become as good as present, while these unprecedented redaction sequences (now conceived by the system) seem a prudential future. For the disasters now beginning to satisfy the functions of their prior and apparently independent sequences now are held back as their concepts bend back into this unforeseen dimension, so that with the new future-system working the world is ready for the new laissez-faire. And the waitress makes her way toward one’s table where one and one’s mother (who once forgivably said one ought to get laid but now seems nervous and looking about as if about to see someone) will order carob ice cream. And some amazing stuff goes down. Yet also, as you’ll see, does not.
Women and Men Page 47