by Rick K. Reut
All Adam had to do was get to his house and hope that the old man was still alive, considering how old he was. From his long-time dead father Cyril Marx he knew that his even earlier deceased granddad Bernard had been sent to the island around the age of twenty-five. That was about eighty years earlier. So, if he were still alive, he’d have to be more than a hundred. Being his peer, so did the old man.
Four times older than I, thought Adam, turning another corner and catching sight of Helmholtz’s house. Looming in the mellow moon light, it was wedged between two identical two-storied buildings on the other side of the street. A little farther on, the passage ended with an obscenely graphitized gate of an old graveyard, turning it into a dead-end street in every sense of the word.
The house was as dark and dreary as the street it stood in, but it still seemed to be shining with starry hope, hope for him to be happy for the first time in his so far so sorrowful life.
Struggling to sift out the seeds of fear growing in him as the house grew closer, Adam crossed the deserted street and slunk up the porch steps. But this time his knocking did not avail to any answer. No answer at all. Growing even more worried, Adam grabbed the doorknob and jerked it a few times, after which the front door cracked and creakily opened as if inviting him to come in.
Sunk in a seashell of silence, the living room seemed even deader than the street. Adam slipped inside, following the footsteps of his own shadow that flashed across the moonlit floor, hastily shutting the door behind him. Cast back into the dark, he stood still, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He held his breath and listened, but heard nothing, nothing but the nervous ticking of an invisible clock.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…
Coming from the depths of the dwelling, it sounded like a time bomb on the edge of explosion. Adam listened on…
Suddenly he heard something. Some motion. Or was it just his own imagination playing pranks on him? After all, what the hell was he doing in this strange house in the middle of the night, with everyone either away or asleep? He was not invited and evidently not welcome. Well, maybe he was, but that was before. This time was a totally different story. Still, a part of him was sure that the old man had asked him to come. Had he really?
He hesitated. Like a burglar on the brink of being caught, he was hit by an urge to get out of the house. Dash for the door and run like hell! Run, run, run!!! His heated brain kept roaring through his body like a racing car engine. Cranking the reverse gear in his head, Adam turned around and fumbled for the doorknob. That was when the Brave New World slipped out of his hands and fell on the floor with a loud flop.
“Who’s there?!”
Adam froze in midsentence as if spellbound. In the tense silence that followed, he felt his belly twist and turn inside out, burning from within with some weird chilling flame, while his whole body was being pierced with a billion tiny needles and washed all over with ice-cold sweat. His mouth instantly went dry; he swallowed, hard, almost choking on his own tongue. Only now did Adam realize that he had been holding his breath. He inhaled heavily, did it as silently as he could, but it still seemed too loud.
“Who’s there, I say?!” cried the darkness, this time much louder and angrier than before.
Adam knew that he had to do something. But what? Pull the door open and dash out in shame? Fly as fast as he could think and never look back? There was still time for that. But then he would probably lose his only chance to be happy, lose it forever. Can I really do that? he asked himself despite already knowing the answer. No! No way! There were no other options but to stay and face the inevitable. He took a deep, lung-bursting breath, but when he opened his mouth, his voice came out rough and raspy, like his tongue was made of lead and his vocal cords of badly oiled steel wire.
“Unc… uncle Helm…” he stuttered, took another deep breath and tried again. This time it went a bit better, with him stressing every syllable in an attempt to regain control over his voice.
“Uncle Helmholtz! It’s me, Adam Marx! I’ve brought your book back!”
There was a short spell silence, and then:
“You again!?” boomed the darkness, seeming a little less angry now. “Well, what the Ford are you waiting for?! Come on in!”
“Sure, I was only…” Adam bent down to pick the Brave New World book up from the floor, “I was only looking for the light switch,” he lied. “It’s kind of dark in here.”
The young man moved towards the source of the voice, waving the darkness away with his free hand. “I was afraid to upset something.” Or someone, he heard himself think.
Following the old man’s voice, Adam soon dived out of the dark into a dimly lit bedroom doorway. The door was half-open and he could see the old man lying in a big double bed that made him look a little too small for its size. The old man seemed almost invisible under the thick blanket pulled all the way up to his neck, thus making his head look as if it had been severed from his body and placed on a pillow in a pool of pale-red light. Grey as a ghost, the old man’s head stared at Adam from under its bushy brows, drilling him with a pair of bloodshot eyes. Once again Adam felt uneasy under the old man’s stare.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you,” he fidgeted, fearing to look the head in the eye. “I thought you were still up. The door wasn’t locked, so, I sort of let myself in,” he stumbled, backing into the darkness of the drawing room. “Anyway, I guess I should go and come back some other time. If you don’t mind, of course…”
But his wordy apologies awoke no reaction. The severed head kept staring at Adam while he stood there in awkward silence, shifting his body from one foot to another.
“Well, I guess, I’d better get going,” he muttered, turning to leave, but the head stopped him.
“Stay,” it said dryly.
Adam halted in indecision.
“Sit,” offered the old man, pulling the blanket down to his solar plexus and pointing to a frayed armchair next to the bed.
Reluctantly, like a cowering dog expecting to be whipped, Adam squeezed his way through the half-open door. Still clutching the Brave New World to his chest, he crossed the room and stopped before the appointed armchair.
Having transformed himself into a living bust with one shift of the blanket, the old man was now watching him with a mean smirk frozen in the corner of his mouth. His head nodded, encouraging Adam to go on.
“So, have you read my book?” asked the bust.
Becoming conscious of his clutch, Adam cast a bewildered look at the book, blushed and held it out to the old man, mumbling: “Yes, I have. Thank you.”
“You can keep it, if you want,” said the head, declining the proffered pack of pages with its eyes alone. “Consider it a gift. Besides, I have no more need for it, for I no longer share the views I tried to express in it.”
“You don’t?” wondered Adam, placing the book on the bedside table between them.
“Of course, I don’t! Do you?” smirked the head, condescendingly. “Only a fool, no, a complete idiot, even worse than an Epsilon, would be willing to surrender happiness for the sake of so-called freedom.”
The head thought for a second, as if getting back together with the rest of the body.
“Let’s take you, for example!”
“Me?!”
“Yes, you,” pressed the torso, taking the initiative, “what would you choose – if you certainly could choose – to be free or to be happy?”
The question, though Adam did not see it coming, did not catch him off guard. He’d thought about it long before he’d read the book and, because of that, knew the answer all too well to waver giving it. However, he also thought that a question of that magnitude demanded some solemnity, which, in its turn, demanded some serious deliberation in silence. And so, that was just what he depicted on his canvas-colored face. Silent deliberation.
“I would choose to be happy,” he finally claimed with conviction, raising his chin to face the first wave of contradiction. But, to his surp
rise, there wasn’t any. On the contrary, it was complete consent and approval that he saw in the eyes of the old man who somehow managed to seem whole again.
“It’s a rare privilege, let alone pleasure, to be talking to a reasonable person once in a while,” he said, beginning to regard his young acquaintance with restrained curiosity, which was as close as his time-tortured heart could get to affection.
“For indeed,” continued the old man, “contrary to what many an imbecile vainly considering himself capable of thinking may think, freedom and happiness are essentially incompatible matters, since no one can be happy and free at the same time. You have to choose either one or the other. And sometimes it is the very possibility of choice, or rather its impossibility, that denies you the former and flings you to the latter. For, for as long as you are free to choose, there is always room for unhappiness in you. You can be completely happy only once you are totally free from the need to decide, and therefore free from the possibility of making a mistake, thus setting you free from the fearful shadows of doubt and uncertainty that having to choose and decide always implies.”
“Provided these choices are right, of course,” he added reflectively. “After all, you can never be absolutely certain that they are before you make them, right? By right I mean that they make you happy, not miserable like the majority of the past totalitarian regimes, which simply made the wrong decisions and choices and were therefore all wrong themselves. They could have been right, though. At least they had that potential. The only reason why they weren’t was that they curtailed the wrong kind freedoms instead of curtailing the right ones; that is, the ones that made people miserable. For freedom to be miserable is the price you have to pay for happiness”.
Suddenly, the old man swept his eyes off the blanket and threw them at Adam, who was all ears.
“Do you have any idea what I’ve just said?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Adam, trembling with uncertainty. “I think I do.”
“You don’t know, you think you do,” the old man mocked his words with scorn, and then added, angrily and as impatiently. “And you mustn’t think! You must only know!”
He then took a deep breath and broke into a strong coughing bout that tore his whole body apart again.
“This, – ekhe-ehke,” said the bust, punctuating the words with dry, hoarse bursts, “is the question of religion! – ekhe-ehke – Starting with Zarathustra, Buddha and Moses – ekhe-ehke – then continuing through Jesus and Muhammad – ekhe-ehke – and, finally, finishing with Ford and Freud – ekhe-ehke. It is the question of faith in your God – ekhe-ehke. For faith gives you confidence – ekhe-ehke – whereas thought gives you nothing but doubt – ekhe-ehke. Thus, – ekhe-ehke – you can afford to think only to a certain point, – ekhe-ehke – the point at which you come to that confidence – ekhe-ehke!”
“This confidence I’m telling you about – ekhe-ekhe,” stepped in the head, “is no other than God, – ekhe-ekhe – God that shields you from the shadows of doubt – ekhe-ekhe – by the light of faith and love – ekhe-ehke. And this faith and this love – ekhe-ekhe – tell you what is right – ekhe-ehke – and what is wrong – ekhe-ekhe. And what is right you must accept – ekhe-ekhe – and what is wrong you must avoid – ekhe-ekhe. Your God is the One who tells you what is right and what is wrong – ekhe-ekhe. And you must follow his footsteps, – ekhe-ekhe – imprinted in your soul as his commandments – ekhe-ekhe – without looking for any reason – ekhe-ekhe – except the one that he is your God, – ekhe-ekhe – your Prophet, or your FordorFreud, – ekhe-ekhe,” coughed out the old man’s head, turning back down to the torso.
“Follow them not with your brain – ekhe-ekhe – but with your heart,” the torso took on. “That is the way all sheep follow their shepherd – ekhe-ekhe – for He is the brain that thinks for them – ekhe-ekhe – and they are the heart that follows the thinking brain – ekhe-ekhe.”
“Do you understand that – ekhe-ekhe?” the old man’s head demanded in the end.
“Yes, I do,” cried Adam, with a wave of confidence lifting his voice to a higher pitch.
“Good! – ekhe-ehke!” croaked the old man, getting together again. “It is these footsteps of Higher Reason that brought you here. Like I was once looking for freedom, being fed up with happiness, you, my young friend, are now looking for happiness, being fed up with freedom. The only difference between us is that I was on the wrong track, whereas you are on the right.”
“I certainly hope so,” Adam whispered.
“O, you certainly hope so,” the old man mocked him again, finally getting enough breath for the booming side of his voice to take over. “And you shouldn’t hope! You should only know! For to hope is still to be miserable, whereas to know is to be sure, and to be sure is to be happy.” He paused. “I will help you to know all you need, so that you could finally be certain about everything. For this is what you are here for, aren’t you?
“Yes, I am,” Adam nodded.
“Good!” boomed the old man, “not a shadow of doubt! Now we are finally getting somewhere.”
He grinned at the young man slyly, with a spark of shrewdness in his faded grey eyes.
“But the first thing you probably want to know is how to get there,” he whispered, stabbing his sharp-nailed index finger at the book of the Brave New World lying on the bedside table between them.
Adam followed the old-man’s finger with his eyes and nodded. The old man nodded, too, as his grin became almost satanic.
“That’s right. The same bad heredity of man, the son of Cain,” hissed he, pointing at Adam’s flushed face.
“Cyril,” Adam corrected automatically.
“Same thing,” said Helmholtz, waving the correction away with his trembling hand. “The only way for you to get away from it is to get away from this Island. But I must partly disappoint you, my young friend, for this place,” he once again stabbed the Brave New World with his finger, now also trembling and so looking as if he was trying to leave his autograph on the title sheet, “no longer exists. At least, not in the way I described it in my book. After all, almost eighty years have passed since then. Things have changed. So has the world.”
“But don’t worry. There’s absolutely no reason for alarm,” he chuckled, seeing the anxious look on Adam’s face, “for it has changed for the better. The thing is that the world I depicted in this book didn’t work that well.”
“It didn’t?” Adam exclaimed in astonishment.
“Well, it did work a bit better than the previous one, of course,” conceded the old man. “But only as far as it goes. It also had its limits, its drawbacks, flaws that could create such despondently dissatisfied searchers like me, or neurotic self-pitying boasters and cowards like your grandfather. And we both felt equally miserable in that world. But the worst thing was that we probably weren’t the only ones. There had to be others. You see, we both were living proofs of the fact that that world didn’t work as well they thought it did. And so, seeing this, the World State’s Controllers – who were truly wise people, real Alpha Pluses, not some cheap phonies like your grandfather or me, – could no longer afford to close their eyes to the terrible truth. Certain changes had to be made, radical changes, changes that would alter the whole human nature and with it the whole human race. Changes that would transcend it on the way to something… something…”
He stumbled in search of a suitable word “…much more advanced and invulnerable to the vicissitudes of human fate. And I don’t know how they did it, but they did it. They finally gave birth to Superman, the very Übermensch Nietzsche used to rave about long before the First Coming of Our Ford and Freud. And that Superman or Superwoman – for it’s actually neither and both at the same time – is a creature that combines two sexes. So, where there once were two old types of one, there is now one new type of two – One Single Combined Unisexual Super Creature. And that Single Combined Unisexual Super Creature, that New Original Trans-Human Species that inhabi
ts the New World State at the moment is called She-male. Or, speaking in more technical terms, Transsexual”.
“Transsexual?” echoed Adam.
“Yes,” cried Helmholtz, “Homo Transsexualis! A creature that has no sex and no gender. But it isn’t asexual at all. Far from it. In fact, it is sexually hyperactive. You see, that hypnotic suggestion that everyone belongs to everyone else, which we used to feed our newly decanted spawn in their sleep all through the First Coming, was only a dream that could never come true. At least not under those conditions. Human nature was simply too strong, standing in stone-hard opposition to the perfect order our predecessors had in mind. And so, human nature had to be changed and changed radically. It was a Freud of a challenge the World Controllers faced back then. But they did it. Unfortunately, I don’t know all the details, for the whole process of embryo development wasn’t my area of expertise. I was only an emotional engineer, after all. All I know is that it has something to do with the primordial dichotomy of the sexes and the social gender binary it begets. To cut it short, they came to the conclusion that that sex and gender dualism was exactly what comprised the main obstacle on the way to human happiness, an obstacle that had to be either circumvented or curtailed. And they did it by entirely eliminating any sex and, as a concomitant, gender difference on the cellular level, thus rendering most of our conditioning completely redundant. And really, who needs to condition an ape to become an ape if the ape is going to do it anyway? They could consequently cut down on all unnecessary work, thus saving plenty of valuable time and energy. So, it was a victory not only for biology but also for economy. You see, if an ape can easily be satisfied with less, why should it need more? And an ape doesn’t really need that much to make it happy if one comes to think of it. Not much more than one needs to satisfy their basic animal wants. And it really isn’t that hard to satisfy those wants once you’ve recognized them for what they are.”
