by John Sladek
Marge did not look at the card. What was this one after? What were they all after? She was thirty, hardly more than plain, anything but sexy. Yet the insurance man—and then Dr Fellstus—and now a rich old man wanted to ‘get her on television’. It was all too absurd!
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘But let me assure you, I have no interest in you personally. Indeed, you may never see me again—Toto is breaking off therapy—but I do feel this isn’t your line of work. And you’d be doing Bradd and his division a favor if you’ll go talk to them. Goodbye.’
Marge still did not look at the card, but sat daydreaming while Dr Fellstus ushered in the next patient. Through the closed door came the sounds of therapy:
‘Shake hands, boy. Come on, Snuffy, shake hands.’
‘Wrowf!’
‘Seems a little upset today, Mrs Grebe. Did you give him the tranquilizers I prescribed?’
‘Oh yes, Doctor. And I did like you said—shook hands with the paper boy to show that he wasn’t our enemy.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well you see, our paper boy isn’t too bright. I guess he thought I was inviting him to make a pass or something. Anyway, he did, and I had to slap him. Poor Snuffy went berserk!’
There was a pause.
‘I see. Well now, we’ll just have to try something else, won’t we?’
Marge picked up the card. National Arsenamtd. O God. She tore it up and threw it in the wastebasket.
No favors were going to be done for that company. First they’d used Bob, then made a medical guinea pig out of him. Destroyed him.
On the other hand, she was tempted. The image of herself as a TV personality appealed to her (and wouldn’t she be, somehow, closer to Bob?) though she damned her vanity (Two featureless electronic blips, suspended in the void…).
She felt like laughing at the whole mess, herself included.
Fellstus showed his patient and patient’s owner out and then turned to Marge, his mustache at an angle of concern.
‘You’ve been crying, poor kid. What’s wrong? And what are you looking for in that wastebasket?’
Mr Bradd wore a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses shaped like little TV screens. He was tanned, athletic, good-looking and (judging by the way he stood too close and talked too loud) homosexual.
‘I’ll give you the straight poop on this, baby. As Bette Cooke, you’ll have a hell of a responsibility. It’s not just froodge, you know.’ Froodge. The word was new to her, probably some coined media term—though for all she knew, everyone was using it. Marge felt as though she were coming out of a convent. ‘It’s something,’ he went on, ‘to live up to. A big, big image.’
He limbered up his pitching arm and fired an imaginary fast ball at his desk. The desk was a giant replica of a cereal package. ‘That’s our old package design for Weethearts. The new one, the exciting one, will have a picture of Bette Cooke herself on it.’
He tested his punch against the palm of his other hand. ‘We’ll do a week of camera tests, keed. If you make it—and you have every chance, Mr Hines seldom fouls out as a talent scout—your face will become better known than Miss Liberty’s. We’ll have you on the soup, the cake mix, the hair drier, the freeze-dried banana-pimento pizza, everything. And on every network time-slot we can grab.
‘So you see, you’ll be a very big package. You’ll be out there, all by yourself, carrying the ball for National Arse. What do you say, kid? Any questions?’
There were no questions. He toed an invisible bag, stretched, and looked at her as if she were the runner on first. ‘Test tomorrow, check with Scheduling for the time. All set, babe?’
Mac Hines rubbed his hands with anticipation, a gesture he’d picked up from television.
‘So Bradd likes her. Well well well well well! This is perfect. She never should have been stuck in that dreary soap opera in the first place. Now she’ll appreciate my help—she’ll be grateful—and when I ask her over for dinner…’
Feinwelt fiddled with the gadget on the mantel. By its left breast, it was 3:30. In the right, the glass was falling, signaling rain. ‘Go on, Glen.’
‘There’s nothing more to tell. I didn’t make it, that’s all. I never make it.’
‘Hmm. Why do you think that is?’
‘There’s always something. Norma Jean had her period. Zelda was thinking it over when the phone rang. Jessina was afraid of her husband—I guess he examines her or something. Jully really wanted to, but she said she had this infection. Glinda was afraid I’d lose respect for her. Pippy was too tired. Heidi said she was just plain afraid.’ He sighed. ‘It’s always something.’
Sighing, he took off the straw boater and sailed it across the room. After a few moments he went to the hat closet, took down a bullfighter’s hat and put it on.
‘Anyway, tonight it’ll be different. I can feel it. I’ve got this hot little number named Lornette all lined up, see. Hank fixed it up. He says she…’
‘Glen, let’s cut out the crap. This isn’t going to be any different from any other night, and you know it. Face facts, you’re no winner. There’s no point in blaming the girls every time, is there? What about all the genuine opportunities you’ve had?’
Glen hung his head.
‘Until you decide what it is you’re really looking for, you won’t find it, believe me. Anyway, what’s important isn’t whether you get laid or not—is it?’
The torero hat fell to the carpet.
‘Visited your mother lately, Glen?’
‘Do you, indeed?’
Feinwelt’s psychoanalytic method was like three-card monte. The victim was tricked into a wrong choice and then it was explained to him how he came to be so stupid. The explanation itself meant nothing—it was but a further piece of misdirection—for there was no ‘right’ choice. Feinwelt believed that whatever a person believed about himself was, by definition, a lie.
‘You think I don’t like my mother, don’t you?’
Feinwelt played a game of church-and-steeple with his fingers.
‘Well, maybe I don’t like her. Maybe I feel she didn’t give me enough love, so—yes, that’s it, of course. I reject her now for her rejection of me in the past!’
‘Indeed? But wasn’t it really your father who rejected you? Didn’t you feel he was paying too much attention to Mom and too little to you?’
‘Of course! That explains everything! I’m so afraid my father will hate me for it, that I can’t make out…’
‘Not so fast. Does it really “explain” everything? Or are you just grabbing at explanations to avoid…’
‘To avoid realizing that I hated both my parents!’
‘Hated? No, what you bottled up for so many years couldn’t have been hate, Glen. Rather, let us say, lust.’
‘Ah? Maybe so. You’re right, Doctor.’
‘And you are too willing to agree with me. So willing that…’
‘I don’t know about that. I hope I know my own mind.’
‘Then why am I here? You don’t mean that. You’re only disagreeing to please me…’
‘No I’m not!’
‘…as you feel you never pleased your dad. Yet on a deeper level, you’d like to kill me.’
‘Wrong again, you officious bastard!’
‘Not at all.’ Feinwelt lit a cigarette with Glen’s table lighter, a jade mermaid that contained a tiny, glassed-in roulette wheel. ‘Not at all. I can see you’ve been squeezing blackheads in your nose just now, both to make yourself “presentable” to me and to inflict upon yourself a mild punishment for not killing me. A punishment you feel you’d really like to direct at your father.’
‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP! I’m warning you.’
‘Exactly. Since your father is dead, there is no one else to warn. Since your mother is too ill to stand as a father-surrogate…’
‘YOU LEAVE MY MOTHER OUT OF THIS!’
‘But that’s exactly what you’re trying to do—leave her out of things. To punish her for,
as you imagine, trying to take the place of your father. You think her cancer is a sibling-substitute, a possible baby brother…’
‘SHUT UP!’
‘Tut. A little respect, Glen boy. Or I’ll take away—this!’ He seized the jade mermaid and made a theatrical gesture of pocketing it. Glen jumped him and the two men fell over the coffee table, releasing a stack of Stagmans which flopped and sprawled around their struggling feet.
‘Take my lighter, you son of a bitch?’
‘Is it so important?’
‘It’s mine!’
The machine began coming to pieces in their hands. Feinwelt, holding the biggest piece, cracked the raging editor behind the neck with it.
‘Don’t apologize,’ he said when Glen came to. ‘It was all part of your therapy. Well, I see our fifty minutes are up. Same time tomorrow, okay?’
‘Nnnnhnm.’
Marge held up a package of frozen peas.
‘Here’s great news for housewives!’ she cried.
‘Here’s GREAT news for housewives!’
‘Here IS great news for housewives!’
‘HERE’S great news for housewives!’
‘Here’s great news for HOUSEwives!’
There were six syllables to the announcement. Each might be said in one of three pitches; with low, ordinary or high volume; drawled out, chopped short or said normally; said with or without a smile and with or without a gesture. That made, they told her, a total of over one and a half trillion ways of saying it, and Marge feared somehow they might make her try them all.
Mr Bradd explained that a few hundred would suffice. ‘We need enough good takes to get a fix on you with our computer editor,’ he said. ‘That does all the pit work. We just get a few sets of good visual and a few of good sound. Then the computer chops and blends it all, to come up with what the fans think they want. Or what the computer thinks they think.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Mr Bradd drove an imaginary golf ball and watched his follow-through. ‘An ad used to be made up, shipped out and that was that. We keep a finger on ratings and sales, and we do polls. If we find out that, say, a smile just on the word “fabulous” pulls sales in Oregon, then we plug that into the computer and it makes up a special video tape for just Oregon. Whatever we learn, we ask for, and the old computer comes up with it. Of course we still have to shoot the stuff, and have some idea of what we want in the first place. And we do need you. You can never really get along without the human element.’ That was Bradd’s favorite line, from an old company training film he’d written years ago.
‘Hey!’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’d better get some shuteye, teammate. Tomorrow’s a big one. See you in the makeup section at eight.’
‘Good night, Mr Bradd.’
“Night, pal.’ He patted her buttocks in a comradely fashion.
Marge went home to study her lines for the following day. No letter from Spot again. An unhappy mask looked back at her from the mirror. It moved, intoning again and again, ‘It’s so easy with KREW! It’s magic!’
Six
At six hundred hours the first bell rings.
Spot (Cadet Sturgemoore Shairp) gets out of bed in the approved manner, first untying the thongs that fasten his wrists to the top side of the blanket, then placing his left foot on the floor (counting off the toes aloud as they touch in order), then pivoting smartly so as to come to attention in a full brace. There are seven wrinkles under his chin, the cleft between his shoulder blades can grip a ping-pong ball, his stomach is sucked in and his elbows make 150° angles.
He holds this position while General Rockstone bellows the morning invocation over the video address system (a cadet is not allowed to look at the screen). Then Spot makes his bed with mitered corners, sweeps his room (beginning at the Northwest corner, in honor of Rockstone’s home state, Alaska) and returns to attention.
At the next bell, he is allowed forty-five seconds to go to the toilet, one minute to shower, and one minute to get into his uniform (tucking in the shirt with wooden paddles). Next, inspection.
Gen. Flamel (‘Rocky’) Rockstone was retiring as president of the St Praetexta Military Academy, and Lt Col Algernon Fouts was taking his place. The entire cadre had assembled on the parade ground, in wind and drizzle, to hear the shrill voice of the cadet colonel read the official history of Rocky’s major (indeed his only) engagement in World War Two:
The US held a chain of Pacific islands known as the Corydons. All but one small island at the end of the chain (thought to be uninhabitable) had been fully cleared and turned to military uses. On the last day of the war, Rocky (then a lieutenant) and thirty men were being ferried by plane from a base in the Corydons to a distant fleet. The plane passed over the entire island chain, flying low and taking of course no evasive action. When it reached the last, Sweet Potato Island, the sky around it was suddenly filled with small-arms fire.
The pilot was killed at once. The wounded co-pilot just managed to crash-land in a thicket. And on VJ Day Rocky and his new command found themselves in the hands of the enemy.
The loss of their plane was somehow undetected—perhaps everyone had been indoors listening to the capitulation on shortwave—and no one came looking for them.
Here the official account was a list of hideous tortures, heroic sacrifices and so on, and it stressed the bravery of Lt Rockstone. What made the tortures unendurable was their taking place within sight of a US naval base on the next island. Rocky and his group were able to see ships come and go, planes skywriting V’s, and even hear victory salutes. They themselves were well hidden in the jungle, and their captors, a stubborn and self-sufficient unit, refused to believe what was obviously true. The plane was assumed lost at sea, and, due to Japanese and American clerical errors, rescue took well over a year.
While they listened to the official account, many of the cadets turned their thoughts to the other, unofficial, version they had read last night after lights-out. It mentioned no tortures. It said in fact that Rocky and his men were treated well by the Japanese, who starved themselves to give them the choicest food, saw to their health, cleanliness and well-being, and even made small gifts of money. It seemed these Japanese soldiers had been without women for some time…
But this was only a schoolboy version, written ungrammatically and typed out in many smudgy carbons, read by flashlights under the blankets. None who read it could really believe all of it.
The shrill voice stopped, and the band, their instruments untuned by the cold, struck up a warped march. The whole school marched past the reviewing stand, past the bunting bearing the school motto (‘Those who say we are women are liars’ was the translation) and once around the parade ground. There were three large rectangles each composed of four small rectangles, each in turn composed of four marching lines of ten children each. One was Spot. He could be easily singled out, had anyone been looking, as the one who changed step every four or five paces, and always unsuccessfully. No one, however, was looking.
Fouts suppressed a yawn. ‘What are your plans, General?’
‘I’m supposed to command a new outfit, X Forces, but I don’t know any more about it than you do. All I know is, we assemble in Florida and await orders from the Pentagon. From that gentleman soldier, General Weimarauner.’ He grimaced. ‘Keep all that under your hat, of course.’
‘Of course.’
The general turned his toothless profile to watch the kids. ‘These boys are pretty easy to handle. About all you have to do is drill the heck out of them and keep them from playing with themselves.’
Rocky considered playing with oneself sinful, weakening, deleterious to physical and mental health, and probably the main cause of syphilis, so-called ‘thalidomide babies’, divorce and losing battles.
Accordingly he forbade solitary showers, toilet doors, single rooms, photographs of any females except mothers, lectures in human biology, dirty jokes, obscene language and possession of any object that might conceivably
be used in masturbation. Shower and toilet time were strictly limited, and touching one’s own unclothed body minimized.
Most jacking off, therefore, went on in the library at study time. Nearly every cadet who was old enough jazzed the bottom of a table while staring blankly at The Rise of the Dutch Republic or Herodotus.
The library was a large drafty room dominated by Rocky’s favorite picture, a painting of Galahad inscribed:
My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure
‘Another thing,’ said the general. ‘Watch out for letters home. Censor them. Remember, parents magnify the slightest complaint.’
Fouts jutted his chin in a tight-collar gesture. ‘But don’t the parents wonder when they get a blacked-out letter?’
‘I didn’t mean like military censorship. I meant, if you get a letter that isn’t right, throw it out. I’ve had one kid here writing three letters a week begging his mother to take him home. Well, naturally, that kind of thing…’
‘Naturally, sir. I don’t believe in coddling America’s next generation of fighting men.’
Wes Davis thought she was just about the whitest woman he’d ever seen. There seemed to be a special message for him alone in the way she held up a slip and said, ‘DRIX just eats dirt! Your white undies will be whiter than Heaven knows!’
One of the other prisoners in the recreation lounge made the mistake of saying something about getting in her undies. It took a guard and three trustees to pull Wes off him.
Later Wes calmed himself enough to read his cellmate a little of the book he was working on:
‘The difference between a nigro and us is like between a skyscraper and a mud hut or a moon rocket and a spear, or God Almighty and a wood baboon. If you wanted a computer, who would you go to a black African country or our Great Nation? If you wanted a constitution a painting or a poem who would you ask some black savage with a bone through his nose or a white man like Tom Jefferson, Norm Rockwell or Ed Guest? Can we go on listening to the syphilitic Europeans and Communist junky perverts who insist the nigro is our equal? He is not our equal because he is not even human!