The Tomorrow File Page 6

  “Nicholas, my loving and devoted son,” she repeated, reaching out her arms. “Come kiss me, chappie.”

  And so I did.

  “How are you, Mother?”

  “ ‘I never saw a purple cow,’ ” she said.

  “What?”

  “ ‘I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one; But I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one.’ ”

  “What on earth is that?”

  “Long before your time.”

  “Mother, it’s nonsense.”

  “Isn’t it?” she said delightedly. “Isn’t it just! You’re so handsome.” “Mother’s beauty, father’s brains.”

  “You’re lucky,” she said, and we let it go at that.

  “This world . . .’’she said.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “Let’s go up to the house. It’s getting chill, and we have so much to talk about.”

  I got her onto her feet and gave her my arm. We walked slowly, slowly up the slope.

  “Nicholas, my loving and devoted son,” she mused.

  “I am that.”

  Behind us, trailing but catching up, Mrs. McPherson trundled along, somber in the dusk.

  “Are you in love, chappie?” She used the word in the obso sense.

  “Not at the moment, Mother.”

  She laughed again. She had been a great beauty. But she had resigned from the world; she no longer belonged.

  When I got mother inside, Mrs. McPherson took over and helped her upstairs to her bedroom. Charles smiled a welcome and took my case. I didn’t know what Charles was. Obviously an obso em, he had to be an NM—but I knew nothing about his genesis. I suspected he might be from GPA-2, from the Tidewater section of what was formerly Virginia.

  I went into the library. I mixed a vodka-and-Smack, mostly vodka. Coming home always did that to me. I could analyze my reactions, but it didn’t help. I wandered about the library. Almost two thousand books my father had never read.

  I was finishing my second drink when I heard the copter overhead. I went outside and stood on the floodlighted porch. I admired the youthful way he leaped from the copter and came bounding across the lawn toward me.

  “Nick-ol’-as!” he shouted as he came. “Nick-ol'-as!”

  It was his joke. He never tired of it.

  He caught me up in a great bear hug. What a ruffian he was! He pulled me close. He smelled of a lot of things: petroscot, a testosterone-based cologne, a scent of something softer—probably from a quick embrace with that blue-haired ef copter pilot.

  In the library, under overhead light, his face, beneath his makeup, seemed old and tired. But his manner hadn’t changed: loud voice; jaunty walk; hard, decisive gestures; barked laugh; the need for physical contact—fingers on arm, arm around shoulders, shoves, pats, strokes, thumps. It was his way.

  He poured us drinks, a petroscot for himself, one of my mother’s potato vodkas for me. We hoisted glasses to each other and sipped.

  “You seem perky,” I said. “Who’s the new tootie?”

  He barked his laugh.

  “You wouldn’t believe.”

  “I’d believe.”

  “Ever catch Circus au Natural? It’s on Thursday nights at 2300.”

  “The contortionist?” I said.

  “You bastard!” He barked again. “You know everything. Hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  We went into the cavernous dining room. We sat next to each other at an oak table large enough to seat twenty. It was genuine oak, all right. When they destroyed an obso building and found reusable oak planks they fashioned them into tables for the wealthy. But first they dipped the planks in caustic, beat them with chains, drilled in fake wormholes, and then used a stencil to make false rings where wet glasses might have rested. Then they coated the whole thing with Plastiseal.

  My father didn’t give a damn about food. Put anything in front of him—he’d eat it. But he had a special fondness for new foods, synthetics, laboratory spices, and refinery flavorings.

  After dinner, dominated by his long, loud discourse on the success of his new sex dolls, we moved back to the library for a natural brandy. He continued his monologue there.

  The sex dolls were not obscene. They were the result of a government contract he had won to produce small Juskin dolls, efs and ems, to teach sex education to four-year-olds. The dolls were naked and complete with genitalia. They had proved so popular that my father had started commercial production. They were now available in three sizes: 28, 60, and 90 cm tall. Many adults bought them.

  Chester K. Flair had long experience in the industry. Originally, he had been employed as a research chemist by a toy and doll manufacturer. He came up with a suggestion for a doll that vomited when you bent it forward sharply. The vomit was a viscous compound containing bits of sharp plastic. You fed it into the doll through a stoppered opening at the nape of its neck. Refills of vomit were to be available in half-liter bottles.

  Also, my father cleverly suggested adding a stain to the fake vomit so that after regurgitation, the doll’s dress was stained ineradicably. The doll’s owner (her parents, actually) would then be forced to purchase a new costume. This doll, my father was convinced, would be an immediate commercial success. He called it Whoopsy-Daisy.

  His employer rejected the idea. My father then married the woman who became my mother. Her name was Beatrice Susan Bennington. With her money—she had an inheritance of 50,000 old dollars—my father resigned his service, formed his own company and, with additional financing, started production of Whoopsy Daisy. His confidence was vindicated. It was an almost instant success. He expanded his corporation to include the production of conventional toys, dolls, and novelties. He was a very knowledgeable and shrewd businessman.

  . When I was nine years old, one of my father’s designers came up with the extraordinary idea of a baby doll that defecated. The ‘ ‘feces” were plastic turds, fed into an opening in the doll above the coccyx.

  The production of the Poo-Poo Doll, as it was called, meant an enormous investment in new dies, formulae, patents, machinery, etc. I remember an incident that occurred during this period. I was then ten years old, and my father still had fantasies of my “following in his footsteps” and becoming a doll manufacturer and director of his enterprises after he retired. He insisted I accompany him to a bank meeting for the purpose of securing a large loan to finance tooling-up for production of the Poo-Poo Doll.

  I listened to my father make his presentation to a tableful of hard-faced bankers. He demonstrated a handmade prototype. He explained, with charts, color slides, and samples, that he was basing his estimate of potential income not only on the initial retail purchase price of Poo-Poo but on continued consumption of packages of fresh plastic turds and miniature paper diapers.

  They listened to his sales pitch expressionlessly. When he finished, they turned to look at each other. He was asking for a great deal of love. Finally, one banker with a skin of parchment made a tent of his hands, stared thoughtfully at the ceiling, and said, “I know we have dolls that piss. But dolls that shit? Isn’t that in rather poor taste?”

  I rarely forget anything. But that I particularly remember

  My father got his loan. The Poo-Poo Doll proved to be the sensation of the industry. It made millions of new dollars.

  My father ended his Panegyric to Sex Dolls abruptly. He poured us each another brandy, then flopped onto the leather couch facing me. “So what’s new?” he asked.

  I recognized that apparently casual “What’s new?” My father was fearful of aging, especially of the loss of physical strength that aging imposes, particularly of the diminution of his sexual vigor. I knew he would never lose the hunger. His terror was of being deprived of the ability to satisfy it.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “We’re fooling around with several things at the moment: a manipulated form of vitamin E that’s had some interesting results on rats; a new steroid we’re constructing; and the pituitary transplant
program is continuing. I really think we’ll find the answer there, in the anterior lobe.”

  “How about injection of testosterone? I think that’s the most obvious answer. After all, I have a BS in chemistry.”

  I refrained from sighing. This was the Bachelor of Science who had flashed me from Hong Kong to ask if there was really any aphrodisiacal benefit in swallowing a ground-up tiger’s tooth, as he had been assured by a Chinese apothecary.

  “Androgen would be the most obvious answer,” I agreed. “If it worked. It’s been tried for years, for half a century, and it doesn’t. But there are so many psychological factors involved, it’s difficult to make an objective evaluation of the results. We can clone ovaries easily, but we’re having trouble with testes. So that leaves direct transplant. Would you like to leave your nuts to science?”

  “Fat chance,” he scoffed. “When they flame me, my nuts are going to be where they’ve always been—between my legs. Who knows, I may go to heaven and need them.”

  “Fat chance,” I repeated, and he laughed.

  We sat a few moments in silence, staring into the cold fireplace. “Something bothering you?” he said finally.

  “Not bothering me, exactly, but perplexing me.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have a Section conference when I get back. I have to make a recommendation to go ahead on a project or to stop it.”

  “What is it?”

  Ordinarily, I don’t like to discuss DIVRAD’s business with outsiders. The indepsec stuff I never do, of course. But it suddenly occurred to me that I might benefit from his practical judgment and shrewdness. I briefly explained Project Supersense to him, how film scenes could be synchronized to give Mind-Jerkers increased stimulation. He listened closely, fascinated. He was always fascinated by anything that affected sexual pleasure, however indirectly.

  “What do you think?” I asked him when I had finished.

  “How many Mind-Jerkers are there in the country?”

  “About two million. Maybe seventy-five percent adults.”

  “How would they pay for this?”

  “I don’t know. We’d license the process, I imagine. The people who make TV tape cassettes might be interested.”

  “I doubt it. Two million isn’t much of a potential market these days. Is there any other way of producing the same results? Say by a pill?”

  “Not at the moment there isn’t.”

  I didn’t tell him about Paul Bumford’s memo in the Tomorrow File on the UP—the Ultimate Pleasure pill.

  “Then forget about Project Supersense. Stop it.” He rose and began to pace about the library. “Try for a pill that increases pleasure. Why a pill? The two big C’s of modern merchandising: Convenience and Consumption. You’ve got to have a product that’s convenient to use, and that is consumed by use, and has to be repurchased periodically. The safety razor was the greatest product ever invented. The makers could give it away, because then you had to buy their blades. That’s where the love was. Ditto the camera. What goddamn good is it without film? No, forget about Project Supersense. Strictly a one-time sale. Put your people to work on a pleasure pill.”

  “It’s not as simple as you think,” I objected. “First of all, what is pleasure? No one can define it. Too subjective. To an obso ef suffering from arthritis, pleasure might simply be absence of pain. To a young em, pleasure might be parachuting from one hundred fifty meters. To me, pleasure is this glass of natural brandy. To you-—well, I know what pleasure is to you.”

  “Don’t say it!” He barked his loud laugh.

  “What I’m getting at is that there are no objective criteria. How can we possibly start synthesizing a pill? We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

  I finished my brandy and stood up. I pleaded tiredness and work to do. He didn’t object. He had work to do, too.

  The copter was still on the front lawn, and I supposed the ef pilot was in the guesthouse, waiting.

  My parents’ home had been built in 1904 by a wealthy Detroit brewer. I was bom a little after midnight in my mother’s bedroom on the second floor.

  The house was a charming horror, a dizziness of gables, turrets, minarets. My father had compounded the insanity by adding a glass-enclosed terrace, a futuristic plastisteel guesthouse, and a boathouse on the river done in Tudor style with beams brought from England. There was an antique coat of arms over the doorway with the motto: Aut Vincere Aut Mori. I told my father it meant “I shall conquer death,” and no one ever enlightened him. He was pleased with it, and had Aut Vincere Aut Mori engraved on his personal stationery.

  My suite was on the third floor. A huge bedroom had a four-poster bed, two enormous armoires that held most of my civilian clothing, chests of drawers, an ornate, gilt-edged pier glass, a few faded prints of sailing ships on the walls. An open doorway (no door) led to a modernized nest. Then there was a small study that was all business: desk, swivel chair, film spindle racks, reading machine, a tape recorder that took cassettes, cartridges, and open-end reels, a TV set, a small refrigerator, and file cabinets.

  The final room was my “secret place.” It was always kept locked. I had, as far as I knew, the only key. Each time I left to go back to GPA-1,1 glued a fine thread from jamb to door, about 20 cm above the floor. The thread had never been disturbed.

  Two walls of this hideaway were the lower slopes of the mansard roof, interrupted by two gabled windows facing south and east. The inside walls and ceiling were plaster, painted white a long time ago. Now they were almost ocher. There was a frazzled rag rug on the planked floor, a sprung Morris chair with the leather seat and back cushion dried and cracking. There was a metal smoking stand, a bottle of my father’s natural brandy and a single glass, a small bookshelf that held four books.

  That’s all there was. Nothing very significant. Except for the four books.

  In 1998, most “books” were published on film spindles, designed for lap and desk reading machines. The few actual books printed were paperbound. To buy a hardcover book, you had to patronize a rare book store, an antique shop, or a merchant who sold secondhand junk. Practically everything ever published had been reproduced on microfilm. It took up so much* less space, people simply sold or gave away their actual books, or threw them out. As my father would say, the film spindles were convenient.

  In 1992, to escape a sudden and unexpected summer shower, I had ducked into a tiny decrepit antique bookstore on Morse Avenue (formerly Second Avenue in Manhattan). I had passed it a few times previously, and was vaguely aware it specialized in obso art books. How it survived I do not know, since you could buy film spindles of most of the world’s great art, and the color reproduction in a viewing machine was incomparably more vivid than on a printed page.

  Waiting for the summer squall to pass, I idly picked up and leafed through a heavily illustrated catalogue of an art exhibit that had been held in New York in 1968. The artist was an em I had never heard of. His name was Egon Schiele.

  It would be melodramatic to declare that coming upon that old art exhibition catalogue by accident on a rainy summer afternoon changed my life. It did not change my life, of course. I continued my service in DOB as before (I was then Executive Assistant to AssDepDirRad). I visited my parents, ate, slept, used around; nothing in my life changed.

  But something in me was altered. I knew it now. How I was altered by seeing the work of Egon Schiele, in what manner and to what extent, I did not compute then and did not now.

  Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter, born in 1890, stopped in 1918. He was twenty-eight. He was the son of a railroad server. He lived in poverty most of his life. He was imprisoned, briefly, for “immorality,” for having shown some of his drawings to curious children. He died of influenza, on the day of his wife’s funeral. She also died of influenza.

  Those were the bare bones of the em’s life. They tell you little, and what they do tell is without significance. The meaning lies in the man’s work.

  If you sta
red for hours, as I had, at the self-portraits, you would see the depth of demonic possession in that face, and you would-be disturbed, as I was disturbed. Did I like the work of Egon Schiele? I did not. But it obsessed me. There had not been a single day since 1992 when, at some time, awake or asleep, I had not suddenly remembered one of his drawings or paintings. With pain, and the sense of loss.

  I had purchased the exhibition catalogue, and the obso shopkeeper promised to try to find more of Schiele’s work. About a month later he mailed me a note—handwritten!—saying he had located another catalogue of a different Schiele exhibition. I bought that one, too. During the following years I was able to buy another book, in poor condition, of sketches Schiele had made while in prison.

  Then one day the owner of the shop where I had purchased the catalogue flashed me, in great excitement. He had heard of an obso ef, a widow, a recluse, who owned a biography of Schiele. If was, reportedly, in mint condition, an enormous volume of 687 pages with 228 full-page reproductions (84 in color), plus 612 text illustrations. She would accept no less than 1,000 new dollars for this prize. I bought it immediately, sight unseen. It was a prize.

  Those were the four books in my secret place: the life and work of Egon Schiele. I had never seen any of his originals (most were in museums in Pan-Europe). I had never been able to locate prints or large reproductions. Schiele’s name was not included on the list of artists whose work was available on film spindles.

  On the cover flap of the largest book, an unknown editor had written: “The anguish of the lonely, the . . . despair of the suffering, the desolation of the desperate, are the moods Schiele expressed. . . . The themes are genesis and decay, longing and lust, ecstasy and despair, suffering and sorrow. ...” This was all true, but it was not the entire truth.

  I sat in my creaking chair, alone in the world, turning pages to feed on those wonders. Yes, there was gloom there, pain and desperation. But I was once again shocked by the colors, the forms, the beauty he had seen and I had not. There was something indomitable there, something triumphant.

  It was after midnight before I closed the book, switched off the light, locked the door, went into my bedroom. Even in bed, my lids resolutely shut, I saw an explosion of color, pinwheels, great rockets and fireworks, all created by that long-stopped em whose eyes stared at me so intently from the self-portraits.