by John Sladek
Muttering came from behind the curtain. ‘ “Nothing by mouth”, sounds like a damn subtitle for À Rebours, you’d think they’d at least offer me a turkey-and-cranberry enema.’
The agent turned towards the voice but it said nothing more. He turned back again, lay still watching the fruit debris, the empty bed next to him, the bed beyond that where an old man was being eased on to a bedpan, the curtained bed beyond that whence a priest emerged, kissing a strip of purple ribbon and folding it away as he hurried out the door, a furtive figure pursued by the microwave cart, then two nurses, then a cartload of uneaten dinners followed by a man in a wheelchair swerving to avoid a man on crutches coming back past a sleeping figure connected to a machine next to an adolescent sitting up in bed with giant headphones and a blank expression, next to an empty bed and another, eight beds, one exit, now blocked by a group of people in surgical green bringing in a cart to collect the man the priest had visited, setting off an argument between the man on the bedpan and the man on crutches as to whether this was routine surgery or getting ready for a heart snatch, the argument continuing until a pitchpipe sounded in the hall and a choir of student nurses looking hungover sang ‘Joy to the World’, ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Christmas in Killarney’ before drifting away to some other ward on their silent feet, all this and more the agent noted and filed, remembering every face, every action, every change until he finally managed to sleep …
Behind him, Ben Franklin opened the curtains, sat up in his sweat-soaked pyjamas, lit a cigarette and reached for his phone.
‘Mr Kratt? Ben here, I’m in Mercy Hospital, that flu I had got worse and – no, two or three days ago, I don’t know, what day is this? … No, I’m not kidding; I was kind of knocked out with this fever … I don’t know, soon as I can sir yes sure only … listen they don’t seem to know what it is, doctor this morning asked me if I had anything to do with cows … Well sure I know you are, I didn’t mean to, yes I know. But what I wanted to tell you, I’ve had a real breakthrough … no, through, sir. Listen I, see I’ve been working on the little problem we talked about, the er, learning machine, you know where I was stuck was in the basic pattern-recognition … yes, well I’m not stuck any more, I’ve really broken through. This fever, seems to make me see clearer, clearer and – I know Dan used to get into these fits too, these kind of fits, he would just be glowing with wisdom, with gnosis, with holy wis – God damn it, Kratt, for once in your life stop yapping about what you want and listen! Because creation, creating life isn’t something you learn or even do, it’s something within us all the time, you know like the secret power these men possess? I mean all my life I’ve been pissing around with half-ass religious ideas, all the time it’s been right there inside me, the complete instructions for building a creature in my own image … are you still there? Yes, it’s inside me, in my genes … No, not cloning, God damn it will you listen? I’m talking about information, information! Man is a learning machine and human genes are blueprints for man so – so all the information has to be packed in there somehow, yet if the machine could only learn itself it, it, we have the answer! I mean we spend our whole lives looking at the edges of the blueprint while the centre is never visible except to madmen, holy madmen – no I am not talking about occultism, will you God damn it stop humouring me, I am talking about information. Information. INFORMATION!’
He slammed down the receiver as the agent awoke and turned over, saying, ‘What’s wrong, you can’t even get Information? Phone company gets worse every –’
‘No, nothing like that.’ Ben Franklin picked up the yellow notebook he’d bought in Taipin, opened to a fresh quadrille-ruled page, and began to scribble. After covering a page and heavily underscoring several items, he put down his pen and looked at the phone again.
‘You gonna try Information again?’
‘No I – I just felt like calling somebody. Too bad it’s Christmas, everybody’ll be answering machines today. Except Dan …’
The pure musical tones aroused by numbered buttons chased each other down the line like echoes, reminding him of something from Kafka (Kafkafka): K. phoning the Castle and hearing a buzz ‘like the sound of countless children’s voices’ now adjusted to harmonious bleats but still innocent because ethereal, ringing from Heaven (hello Central) or against Heaven (vox inhumana) or crying out loud for bodies …
At University Hospital a nurse crunched a piece of candy cane as the phone rang, swallowed sherds as she answered. ‘Who? Mr Sonnenschein? I’ll see if we have him today you know a lot of people went home …’
She rose, biting down on another inch of striped sugar and brushing crumbs from her nylon uniform as she pushed past the Christmas tree and through a door into the ward. Most of the other nurses were, like her, here for the day only; no one knew who Mr Sonnenschein was.
Two doctors were conferring over an elderly bedridden patient, now going blue in the face. One of them, Dr D’Eath, suggested Ward D.
‘Right through that door down there and keep going, you can’t miss it,’ he said, and leaned across his patient to tap the electronic Kardiscope as though it were a brass barometer. ‘Not so terrific here, thanks to that ham-handed … think he’d try reading the contraindications before he starts shoving Euphornyl into an eighty-year-old patient with a history of … could have used Hynosate or Geridorm, Narcadone any damn thing but this! Okay then. What we need here is 50 ccs of Elimindin in the i.v., then start the Eudryl when he comes to, okay? Oh, and Dormevade, five milligrams every three
‘Fine sure fine, great idea, Shel, now if uh you got a minute maybe you could look at my girl here, little chemotherapy problem, Nurse wake her up will you, MINNIE … MORNING MINNIE!’
‘Doctor, I believe her name is Mary, Mary Mendez …’
‘Minnie, Mary, what’s the difference? HEY MARY? WAKE UP!’
The false eyelashes parted on large grey eyes that held no expression. Creaking sounds began in the throat.
‘HOW YOU DOING, MARY?’ Dr Coppola proffered to his senior colleague a chart, with the deference of a wine waiter with a list. Both men and the nurse ignored Mary who, having sat up to adjust the large bow that covered a stainless steel plate in her scalp, was trying to speak. The rusty sounds in her throat became more frantic.
‘How long you had her on Actromine with Ananx? No wonder you got a Parkinsonism situation building here, you ought to … and try switching over to Integryl with Doloban, see how that … or wait, how about Dormistran with Kemised? That should do the trick.’
‘CAN YOU HEAR ME, MARY? HOW’S THE HEADACHE? EH?’
‘… wind me up … wind me up …’
‘You could have tried Solacyl with Promoral, but sooner or later you’d have to feed in Thanagrin and
‘Promoral sure sure sure, Shel, only with the old head injury and the labyrinthitis you don’t think …?’
‘… wind me up … I’m running down …’
‘Okay then Lobanal, play it safe. Lobanal with Doloban, why stick your neck out?’ And as the two doctors passed on, the nurse trailing like a caddy, they talked of Amylpoise and Dexadrone, Disimprine and Equisol, Joviten and Nyctomine …
At the door of Ward D they encountered once more the Christmas substitute nurse, again running on her silent shoes but now looking distressed and holding a hand to her mouth.
‘Probably walked in on the ECT,’ said Dr Coppola as they wheeled past the room where Dan Sonnenschein still arched and twisted on a table, trembling limbs held down by straps and strong assistants as his spine beat like a flagellum, trying to fling his head free of the smoking electrodes. Dr D’Eath paused to watch the body lunge once, twice and lie still, all but the fingers and toes.
‘Well, Jesus, you can’t blame the poor girl. They have to stick this therapy room right out here where anybody can walk by and see it,’ he said. ‘Anyway I hate it myself, it’s so darned crude, like setting fire to a chicken ranch to fry one egg. There has to be a better way.’
‘I know, I
know, it’s so medieval – they used to burn the body of a heretic for the good of his soul, and now we’ve kind of turned that around. But what are the real alternatives, drugs? How can you trust them to take the pills once they’re out, eh? The old paradox of freedom, eh? What happens when the depressive gets too depressed to take his anti-depressants?’
His boyish laugh drifted back through the open door to be relayed as a scream of nervous laughter from Mary Mendez. Dr D’Eath said, ‘I like this idea of yours about working on self-images with some of these patients, what I’ve heard of it.’
‘I’d like to try a pilot scheme here, very soon. You gotta admit, Shel, it’s about the cheapest damn therapeutic idea in years, all we have to buy is a couple dozen rubber animal masks. See I was reading Levi-Strauss one day on totems and all at once it hit me, we all need to “be” animals once in a while, to restructure our self-images by new rules … become cats and mice or ducks …’
‘Sure, I see …’
‘… easily recognized signs and codes, I am a pig, to help communicate in a society grown too large and too …’
‘Sure, sure, sure, sure …’
Mary yelped again, the noise just reaching the nurse who was closing a door and pushing past the tree to the phone:
‘Mr Frankstein? Frankline? I’m sorry but he can’t come to the phone right now, he’s urn, he’s urn –’ Her mind filled with movie images of fluttering lights, lightning, the smoking electrodes, the figure on the long table straining, making Galvanic lunges against the straps, the smoking electrodes, hands gripping the arms of the electric chair, tall shadows, the sputtering arch, the baritone hum of electricity, vis vitalis rising on a swell to become a dial tone as she sat, receiver forgotten in her hand, watching the lights on the Christmas tree grow suddenly dim and bright again. Her mouth filled with peppermint bile.
Ben Franklin turned from the phone to his yellow notebook, muttering. ‘No telling what kind of cretins they get to work over there, can’t even work out how to call somebody to the phone.’
‘You said it, buddy,’ said the agent.
Ben twitched the curtain closed and scribbled alone until he slept, waking with a shout in the darkness, soaking wet and shivering as he was again waking in the morning if it was morning, to find himself muttering, ‘Hexcellent, a most hexcellent dancer, your servant ladies and gentlemen …’ And plunged back into that sea of sleep out of which he always seemed to emerge dripping and chilled on the shore of what could hardly be called consciousness.
He was aware of changes: the man with the bandaged head and the self-pitying face in the next bed vanished to be replaced by a salesman of religious novelties who had a noisy TV; he in turn gave way to an old man who kept his teeth in a glass; one morning he was gone but the teeth remained.
An expert on tropical diseases came to look at Ben.
‘Malaria,’ he said. ‘Where have you been travelling?’
‘Only to Taipin.’
‘Try again, there’s no malaria in Taipin. No mosquitoes.’
But they treated him for malaria and he began to improve; one day he sat up and tried to read his notes:
Tolstoi’s ‘Our body is a machine for living’ as a recipe for
French stone. Stones of Deucalion? J. Baptist says God can raise stones up children to Abraham, a pun on children (banim) & stones (abanim) – why always stones or clay in legends as though mineral future reality foreseen, cybern. Kids out of sand?
If we made them would they purge us of the terrible disease of being human?
Can a mind be built from within, by one thought?
‘Everything must be like something, so what is this like?’ – Forster?
Another noisy TV went on, and Ben found himself jerked out of naps by news programmes:
‘… where Machines Lib demonstrators broke into the Digital Love computer dating agency and deprogrammed the computer. Two were arrested, and now Digital Love says it will sue for deprivation of data. Here’s Del Gren on the spot with an up-to-the-minute report. Del?’
The screen showed a ragged line of people in parkas, carrying signs: THIS STORE DEGRADES MACHINES and NO MORE COMPUTER PIMPS. One marcher, a fairly old man with iced-up glasses, paused to shake a mittened fist at the camera. A microphone darted out towards him like a striking snake.
‘Thanks, Mel, these people have been picketing all day. Uh, what is it you’re protesting about, sir?’
‘Well it’s – what do you mean? Machines!’
‘Yes? Just what –?’
‘About the machines! About the unfair, the unfair –’
‘Thanks now if I can just get someone else in on this, you, ma’am?’
A plump woman whose face looked frostbitten came forward, waved her sign and said, ‘We’re against the exploitation of machines! Man if you look at this in the historical context of the last two hundred years it just makes you throw up! Just look how machines get a raw deal all down the line, all the dirty and degrading jobs like rolling steel and pulling trains, not even blacks or women ever had to pull trains.’
‘Yes well thank you this is Del –’
Someone shouted ‘Humanists Go Home!’ and others took up the chant.
‘– Del Gren returning you to Mel?’
‘… fortunate enough to have here in the studio the founder and guiding hand of Machines Lib, Miz Indica Dinks. Hi Indica, and welcome to Minnetonka. Can we get the ball rolling here by finding out just what Machines Lib is all about? What’s the bottom line here?’
‘Hi, Mel, I’m originally from Minnetonka and it’s great to be back. First off let me say that we’re not against people. Far from it! When machines are set free, people will be set free too. In my new book, plug, plug, The Nuts and Bolts of Machines Lib, I explain just how that works out. By the way I’ll be autographing my book next Tuesday at the Vitanuova Shopping Piazza all day.’
‘Fascinating idea, Indica. But what kind of world would it be if all the machines could do what they wanted?’
‘A better world, Mel. A world where a lot of the pressure is off. Just look at now, at our light bills and repair bills and instalments, all the money we pour into just keeping our machines down. But once we ease up and set them free, all that pressure and tension just goes away! Once you stop owning a dishwasher, you can stop paying for it too. Machines Lib means people lib too – and, Mel, that’s what I think America is all about freedom!’
Her beauty pursued Ben. Damn it she looked no older than that day she’d walked out on him to take a job as a dancing taco all those years ago. He remembered her last speech: ‘Ben, I’ll never cut it hanging around a University, I need to fulfil myself. We just, we’re just too different, our worlds are poles apart.’
Now no one ever remembered his part in her life, the questions as now were always about her second husband:
‘Miz Dinks, Indica, how about your ex-husband Hank Dinks? Isn’t he founding a movement of his own? What do you think of his New Luddites?’
‘Yes, he has this little band of fanatics running around wrecking machines. I feel sorry for them, they’re just being self-destructive. To me, America is not about tearing down, it’s about building up. No, Hank and I are just too different. Our worlds are poles apart?
Ben’s phone made a faint sound and he answered it.
‘Mr Franklin? I have a call for you from Mr Kralt, will you hold?’
The perfectly-shaped nail and finger of Mrs McBabbitt pushed two buttons in succession. ‘I have Mr Franklin on the line for you.’
‘Cancel him, Connie, I’m gonna be tied up here a while with Jud Mill.’ The stubby hand with its massive gold ring mounting a pinball pushed buttons to turn off the TV and close a wall panel over the screen, then moved to the cheap cigar smouldering in the ashtray.
‘Okay, bub, you’ve had a chance to look over our media figures, where did we go wrong? I don’t count the losses on K.T. Art Films, we budgeted those, writing off taxes on the equipment we managed to sell to Ta
ktar Video our other production subsidiary, the one who’s dealing for cable leasing – I think we got all that under control. It’s our publishing interests that worry me, right from Katrat Books, Folks magazine and –’
‘Yes yes yes, well that’s what you hired me for, what media management consultancy is all about,’ said the other man. Leaning forward slightly so that the long striped wings of his shirt collar crackled, he peered down through his half-moon reading glasses at the open portfolio; he ran his finger down a column of figures.
‘Your timing could be better, with some of these properties you leave loose ends dangling. Take this Politics of Pregnancy, you should of tied up video cassette rights and cable royalties first thing, the author could just walk away with everything. Anyway you’re using it as a lead book and it’s not strong enough to sustain a real attack on the market, you need something better, a very strong item indeed like that psychic pigeon book.’
Kratt nodded. ‘We’ve had a lot of author trouble –’
‘That’s lesson number one: dump the author. When I package a property, I try to leave out the author, bring him in as the last element. Then I make damn sure he’s just hired to do a job, paid off and kissed off. Like with Boy and Girl, that was just an idea I came up with, me and Sol Alter were sitting around by the pool one day and I said: “How about a simple boy and girl story: some kinda tragedy?” and he said: “Good movie idea there: boy meets girl, girl goes blind and boy leaves her, he goes back but it’s too late, she’s already committed suicide.” (That was the uptown version, we also mapped out a downtown version where the girl gets eaten by her seeing-eye dog.) But anyway we interested Jerre Mice in starring, that enabled us to bootstrap a six-figure plus percentage movie deal, and with all that we had something to take to publishers, we landed a seven-figure paperback deal and from there on had no problem getting all we wanted out of magazine serialization, hardcover, book club, foreign and cassette rights, direct cable specials, options for a TV series, syndicated comics, T-shirts, board games, colouring books and so on. Then we fixed the music and wrapped up those rights. And then and only then did we finally hire an author to hammer out the screenplay and book, the fictionalization. We paid him I think two grand and no comebacks.’
