Flux Tales Of Human Futures
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For two days Cloward brooded. All the time he did, Sarah Wynn was grieving over
her three-days' husband who had just been killed in a car wreck on Wilshire
Boulevard, wherever the hell that was. But now the body was scarcely cold and
already her old suitors were back, trying to help her, trying to push their love on
her. "Can't you let yourself depend on me, just a little?" asked Teddy, the handsome
one with lots of money.
"I don't like depending on people," Sarah answered.
"You depended on George." George was the husband's name. The dead one.
"I know," she said, and cried for a moment. Sarah Wynn was good at crying. Hiram
Cloward turned another page in The Brothers Karamazov.
"You need friends," Teddy insisted.
"Oh, Teddy, I know it," she said, weeping. "Will you be my friend?"
"Who writes this stuff?" Hiram Cloward asked aloud. Maybe the Aryan in the
television company offices had been right. Make some friends. Get the damn set
turned off whatever the cost.
He got up from his chair and went out into the corridor in the apartment building.
Clearly posted on the walls were several announcements:
Chess club 5-9 wed
Encounter groups nightly at 7
Learn to knit 6:30 bring yarn and needles
Games games games in game room (basement)
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Just want to chat? Friends of the Family 7:30 to 10:30 nightly
Friends of the Family? Hiram snorted. Family was his maudlin mother and her
constant weeping about how hard life was and how no one in her right mind would ever
be born a woman if anybody had any choice but there was no choice and marriage was a
trap men sprung on women, giving them a few minutes of pleasure for a lifetime of
drudgery, and I swear to God if it wasn't for my little baby Hiram I'd ditch that
bastard for good, it's for your sake I don't leave, my little baby, because if I
leave you'll grow up into a macho bastard like your beerbelly father.
And friends? What friends ever come around when good old Dad is boozing and
belting the living crap out of everybody he can get his hands on?
I read. That's what I do. The Prince and the Pauper. Connecticut Yankee. Pride and
Prejudice. Worlds within worlds within worlds, all so pretty and polite and funny as
hell.
Friends of the Family. Worth a shot, anyway.
Hiram went to the elevator and descended eighteen floors to the Fun Floor. Friends
of the Family were in quite a large room with alcohol at one end and soda pop at the
other. Hiram was surprised to discover that the term soda pop had been revived. He
walked to the cola sign and asked the woman for a Coke.
"How many cups of coffee have you had today?" she asked.
"Three."
"Then I'm so sorry, but I can't give you a soda pop with caffeine in it. May I
suggest Sprite?"
"You may not," Hiram said, clenching his teeth. "We're too damn overprotected."
"Exactly how I feel," said a woman standing beside him, Sprite in hand. "They
protect and protect and protect, and what good does it do? People still die, you
know."
"I suspected as much," Hiram said, struggling for a smile, wondering if his humor
sounded funny or merely sarcastic. Apparently funny. The woman laughed.
"Oh, you're a gem, you are," she said. "What do you do?"
"I'm a detached professor of literature at Princeton."
"But how can you live here and work there?"
He shrugged. "I don't work there. I said detached. When the new television
teaching came in, my PQ was too low. I'm not a screen personality."
"So few of us are," she said sagely, nodding and smiling. "Oh, how I long for the
good old days. When ugly men like David Brinkley could deliver the news."
"You remember Brinkley?"
"Actually, no," she said, laughing. "I just remember my mother talking about him."
Hiram looked at her appreciatively. Nose not very straight, of course-- but that
seemed to be the only thing keeping her off TV. Nice voice. Nice nice face. Body.
She put her hand on his thigh.
"What are you doing tonight?" she asked.
"Watching television," he grimaced.
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"Really? What do you have?"
"Sarah Wynn."
She squealed in delight. "Oh, how wonderful! We must be kindred spirits then! I
have Sarah Wynn, too!"
Hiram tried to smile.
"Can I come up to your apartment?"
Danger signal. Hand moving up thigh. Invitation to apartment. Sex.
"No."
"Why not?"
And Hiram remembered that the only way he could ever get rid of the television was
to prove that he wasn't solitary. And fixing up his sex life-- i.e., having one--
would go a long way toward changing their damn profiles. "Come, on," he said, and
they left the Friends of the Family without further ado.
Inside the apartment she immediately took off her shoes and blouse and sat down on
the old-fashioned sofa in front of the TV. "Oh," she said, "so many books. You
really are a profes6or, aren't you?"
"Yeah," he said, vaguely sensing that the next move was up to him, and not having
the faintest idea of what the next move was. He thought back to is only fumbling
attempt at sex when he was (what?) thirteen? (no) fourteen and the girl was fifteen
and was doing it on a lark. She had walked with him up the creekbed (back when there
were creeks and open country) and suddenly she had stopped and unzipped his pants
(back when there were zippers) but he was finished before she had hardly started and
gave upinm disgust and took his pants and ran away. Her name was Diana. He went home
without his pants and had no rational explanation and his mother had treated him
with loathing and brought it up again and again for years afterward, how a man is a
man no matter how you treat him and he'll still get it when he can, who cares about
the poor girl. But Hiram was used to that kind of talk. It rolled off him. What
haunted him was the uncontrolled shivering of his body, the ecstacy of it, and then
the look of disgust on the girl's face. He had thought it was because-- well, never
mind. Never mind, he thought. I don't think of this anymore.
"Come on," said the woman.
"What's your name?" Hiram asked.
She looked at the ceiling. "Agnes, for heaven's sake, come on."
He decided that taking off his shirt might be a good idea. She watched, then
decided to help.
"No," he said.
"What?"
"Don't touch me."
"Oh for pete's sake. What's wrong? Impotent?"
Not at all. Not at all. Just uninterested. Is that all right?
"Look, I don't want to play around with a psycho case, all right? I've got better
things to do. I make a hundred a whack, that's what I charge, that's standard,
right?"
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Standard what? Hiram nodded because he didn't dare ask what she was talking about.
"But you obviously, heaven knows how, buddy, you sure as hell obviously don't know
what's going on in the world. Twenty bucks. Enough for the ten minu
tes you've
screwed up for me. Right?"
"I don't have twenty," Hiram said.
Her eyes got tight. "A fairy and a deadbeat. What a pick. Look, buddy, next time
you try a pickup, figure out what you want to do with her first, right?"
She picked up her shoes and blouse and left. Hiram stood there.
"Teddy, no," said Sarah Wynn.
"But I need you. I need you so desperately," said Teddy on the screen.
"It's only been a few days. How can I sleep with another man only a few days after
George was killed? Only four days ago we-- oh, no, Teddy. Please."
"Then when? How soon? I love you so much."
Drivel, George thought in his analytical mind. But nevertheless obviously based on
the Penelope story. No doubt her George, her Odysseus, would return, miraculously
alive, ready to sweep her back into wedded bliss. But in the meantime, the suitors:
enough suitors to sell fifteen thousand cars and a hundred thousand boxes of Tampax
and four hundred thousand packages of Cap'n Crunch.
The nonanalytical part of his mind, however, was not the least bit concerned with
Penelope. For some reason he was clasping and unclasping his hands in front of him.
For some reason he was shaking. For some reason he fell to his knees at the couch,
his hands clasping and unclasping around Crime and Punishment, as his eyes strained
to cry but could not.
Sarah Wynn wept.
But she can cry easily, Hiram thought. It's not fair, that she should cry so
easily. Spin flax, Penelope.
***
The alarm went off, but Hiram was already awake. In front of him the television
was singing about Dove with lanolin. The products haven't changed, Hiram. thought.
Never change. They were advertising Dove with lanolin in the little market carts
around the base of the cross while Jesus bled to death, no doubt. For softer skin.
He got up, got dressed, tried to read, couldn't, tried to remember what had
happened last night to leave him so upset and nervous, but couldn't, and at last he
decided to go back to the Aryan at the Bell Television offices.
"Mr. Cloward," said the Aryan.
"You're a psychiatrist, aren't you?" Hiram asked.
"Why, Mr. Cloward, I'm an A-6 complaint representative from Bell Television. What
can I do for you?
"I can't stand Sarah Wynn anymore," Hiram said.
"That's a shame. Things are finally going to work out for her starting in about
two weeks."
And in spite of himself, Hiram wanted to ask what was going to happen. It isn't
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fair for this nordic uberman to know what sweet little Sarah is going to be doing
weeks before I do. But he fought down the feeling, ashamed that he was getting
caught up in the damn soap.
"Help me," Hiram said.
"How can I help you?"
"You can change my life. You can get the television out of my apartment."
"Why, Mr. Cloward?" the Aryan asked. "It's the one thing in life that's absolutely
free. Except that you get to watch commercials. And you know as well as I do that
the commercials are downright entertaining. Why, there are people who actually
choose to have double the commercials in their personal progranuning. We get a
thousand requests a day for the latest McDonald's ad. You have no idea."
"I have a very good idea. I want to read. I want to be alone."
"On the contrary, Mr. Cloward, you long not to be alone. You desperately need a
friend."
Anger. "And what makes you so damn sure of that?"
"Because, Mr. Cloward, your response is completely typical of your group. It's a
group we're very concerned about. We don't have a budget to program for you-- there
are only about two thousand of you in the country-- but a budget wouldn't do us much
good because we really don't know what kind of programming you want."
"I am not part of any group."
"Oh, you're so much a part of it that you could be called typical. Dominant
mother, absent and/or hostile father, no long-term relationships with anybody. No
sex life."
"I have a sex life."
"If you have in fact attempted any sexual activity it was undoubtedly with a
prostitute and she expected too high a level of sophistication from you. You are
easily ashamed, you couldn't cope, and so you have not had intercourse. Correct?"
"What are you! What are you trying to do to me!"
"I am a psychoanalyst, of course. Anybody whose complaints can't be handled by our
bureaucratic authority figure out in front obviously needs help, not another
bureaucrat. I want to help you. I'm your friend."
And suddenly the anger was replaced by the utter incongruity of this nordic
masterman wanting to help little Hiram Cloward. The unemployed professor laughed.
"Humor! Very healthy!" said the Aryan.
"What is this? I thought shrinks were supposed to be subtle."
"With some people-- notably paranoids, which you are not, and schizoids, which you
are not either."
"And what am I?"
"I told you. Denial and repression strategies. Very unhealthy. Acting out-- less
healthy yet. But you're extremely intelligent, able to do many things. I personally
think it's a damn shame you can't teach."
"I'm an excellent teacher."
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"Tests with randomly selected students showed that you had an extremely heavy
emphasis on esoterica. Only people like you would really enjoy a class from a person
like you. There aren't many people like you. You don't fit into many of the normal
categories."
"And so I'm being persecuted."
"Don't try to pretend to be paranoid." The Aryan smiled. Hiram smiled back. This
is insane. Lewis Carroll, where are you now that we really need you?
"If you're a shrink, then I should talk freely to you."
"If you like."
"I don't like."
"And why not?"
"Because you're so godutterlydamn Aryan, that's why."
The Aryan leaned forward with interest. "Does that bother you?"
"It makes me want to throw up."
"And why is that?"
The look of interest was too keen, too delightful. Hiram couldn't resist. "You
don't know about my experiences in the war, then, is that it?"
"What war? There hasn't been a war recently enough--"
"I was very, very young. It was in Germany. My parents aren't really my parents,
you know. They were in Germany with the American embassy. In Berlin in 1938, before
the war broke out. My real parents were there, too-- German Jews, or half Jews,
anyway. My real father-- but let that pass, you don't need my whole genealogy. Let's
just say that when I was only eleven days old, totally unregistered, my real Jewish
father took me to his friend, Mr. Cloward in the American embassy, whose wife had
just had a miscarriage. 'Take my child,' he said.
"'Why?' Cloward asked.
" 'Because my wife and I have a perfect, utterly foolproof plan to kill Hitler.
But there is no way for us to survive it.' And so Cloward, my adopted father, took
me in.
"And then, the next day, he read in the papers about how my real parents had been
chance, while my parents were on their way to carry out their foolproof plan, some
brown shirts in the street had seen them. Someone pointed them out as Jews. They
were bored-- so they attacked them. Had no idea they were saving Hitler's life, of
course. These nordic mastermen started beating my mother, forcing my father to watch
as they stripped her and raped her and then disemboweled her. My father was then
subjected to experimental use of the latest model testicle-crusher until he bit off
his own tongue in agony and bled to death. I don't like nordic types." Hiram sat
back, his eyes full of tears and emotion, and realized that he had actually been
able to cry-- not much, but it was hopeful.
"Mr. Cloward," said the Aryan, "you were born in Missouri in 1951. Your parcnts of
rccord are your natural parents."
Hiram smiled. "But it was one hell of a Freudian fantasy, wasn't it? My mother
raped, my father emasculated to death, myself divorced from my true heritage, etc.,
etc."
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The Aryan smiled. "You should be a writer, Mr. Cloward."
"I'd rather read. Please, let me read."
"I can't stop you from reading."
"Turn off Sarah Wynn. Turn off the mansions from which young girls flee from the
menace of a man who turns out to be friendly and loving. Turn off the commercials
for cars and condoms."
"And leave you alone to wallow in cataleptic fantasies among your depressing
Russian novels?"
Hiram shook his head. Am I begging? he wondered. Yes, he decided. "I'm begging. My
Russian novels aren't depressing. They're exalting, uplifting, overwhelming."
"It's part of your sickness, Mr. Cloward, that you long to be overwhelmed."
"Every time I read Dostoevski, I feel fulfilled."
"You have read everything by Dostoevski twenty times over. And everything by
Tolstoy a dozen times."
"Every time I read Dostoevski is the first time!"
"We can't leave you alone."
"I'll kill myself!" Hiram shouted. "I can't live like this much longer!"
"Then make friends," the Aryan said simply. Hiram gasped and panted, gathering his
rage back under control. This is not happening. I am not angry. Put it away, put it
back, get control, smile. Smile at the Aryan.
"You're my friend, right?" Hiram asked.