Adventures of the Artificial Woman

by Thomas Berger

  “Well, I won’t forget you, Cliff,” Pierce said, rising. “Let me know if I can help in any fashion. I hope you meet someone soon.”

  “God forbid!” Cliff gasped. “That’s the source of all my troubles. I’m trying to pry my heart off my sleeve, at this late date.”

  Janet formerly Hallstrom was a more difficult case. First it took Pierce’s private investigators a while to locate her. She was no longer surnamed Hallstrom. She had disposed of her business some years before and apparently left town, but for where was not easy to determine. It became evident that she was intentionally dodging her creditors.

  When she was finally run to ground, it turned out she had not moved far at all. She had remained local, but simply had altered her name to Janet Stromhall, which was enough to make her legally invisible.

  It had been Phyllis’s suggestion that the tracers consider such a transposition of syllables. “It’s one of a number of simple cryptological procedures, Ellery, but effective sometimes when the adversary expects more sophisticated techniques.”

  In distinction to Cliff, Janet was well aware of Hallstrom’s recent exploit and was deliberating on the possibilities of profiting from it in some way, as she readily admitted to Pierce when he found her.

  “Look,” she said, “Phyllis was making it big time in the movies at just the point where my own fortunes began to fall. Then came the TV show. Now she’s some kind of heroine, and running for President? Give me a break! A goddam robot? Who does she think she is?”

  “When we get into office,” Pierce assured her, “we’re setting up a special department of the Small Business Administration devoted to women. That’ll need to be headed up by someone who knows what she wants. I see a big role for you.”

  But this was not quite enough to ensure Janet’s cooperation. “I’m trying to get back in business, Ellery, but I’m underfunded.”

  He chewed his lip. “That’s our problem too, Janet. We started the campaign late, all the major contributors were already taken. We’re having to go to the little guy with twenty-dollar bills.”

  “My heart bleeds,” Janet said, “but for myself. I’m having a tough time just paying the phone bill, not to mention the office rent.”

  “I’ll see what we can do, Janet.”

  19

  It went without saying that had Phyllis been human she could not have run for President at that late a date, the demands of a campaign being what they were physically, emotionally, psychically, nor could Pierce have played any role at all. As it was, he drew his strength from her, she who had an inexhaustible supply thereof, as well as a wisdom that he was tempted nonsensically to call natural; it compensated for his utter lack of experience in politics.

  Of course they had a full complement of hired advisors, among them several of Joe Sloan’s former aides, since disaffected by his reflex action when in trouble, viz, to shitjob the nearest at hand (e.g., the Commerce Secretary who repeated to a reporter a fat-woman joke told him by Sloan; the general who on Sloan’s demand let the President operate the remote controls of a drone aircraft that subsequently plunged into the Caribbean only narrowly missing a crowded cruise ship; the gay assistant whom Sloan used as “beard” during the latter’s affair with the teenaged daughter of Biff Oakland, the movie star and Sloan crony: The secretary was fired, the general lost a star, and Jameson Webb sustained a beating from Oakland that put him in the hospital).

  Webb was eager to furnish extensive data on Sloan’s illicit sexual exploits, and there were those, Pierce among them, who were keen on using such in a campaign that everyone assumed must go negative if it were to overcome the disadvantages of a late start, an inexperienced candidate, and the write-in process.

  But it was Phyllis who, at first single-handedly, opposed this policy. “It might be otherwise if there were only one or two examples,” said she, “and furthermore if they had been hitherto unknown to the general electorate, or at least only the fare of supermarket tabloids. But President Sloan is famous for such episodes, which have been so frequent as to become a joke. And in fact, if the phony assassination attempt is indicative, there may be reason to believe that some of these events have been cut from the whole cloth by Joe Sloan himself.”

  “But why, Phyllis,” Pierce asked, speaking for most of the others around the strategy table, “would he defame himself?”

  “Obviously, he went too far with the fake assassination, but up to now, such tactics have usually worked very well. There are many human beings who feel better about themselves if they think they are morally superior to those above them in power or wealth. Sloan early on learned an effective means to allay envy. His opponent last time was too impeccable to be attractive to most people, whom he made feel inferior: teetotaling, ethically stainless, a war hero whose apparent purpose as a civilian business success was to become a philanthropist. Sloan saw that he could hardly compete with Wellington in virtue. His only hope was as a scoundrel—not an outright criminal but someone just contemptible enough to amuse a plurality of the voters in a time of peace.”

  It was old Howell Fairchild, veteran of three Presidential campaigns—two of them victorious—who asked, “The latest stunt was a bridge too far?”

  “Cowardly is what most people regard as natural. Being a coward is unacceptable.”

  Old Fairchild nodded respectfully. He had not gotten to be the dean of campaign advisors by disregarding intelligent analysis from whatever source, and he soon recognized in Phyllis, though she had come from the vast nullity, to him, of the realm outside politics, a brilliant young woman. He was also a ladies’ man of the old school and often complimented her on her taste in attire—which was in fact derided by several female columnists as being too demure, too retro, pillbox hat, gloves, more knee-length skirts than pants. But as usual likely voters approved, males overwhelmingly; females by 59.3 percent (though the breakdown by category showed wide variations according to age and/or marital status).

  That Phyllis had no history was a problem in a campaign crawling with investigative reporters anxious to find and expose the secret every candidate, every human being, kept closeted, and destroy him/her irrespective of ideology, but they were frustrated this time out, for Ransome’s sin was only gluttony (deepfried snacks); Sloan was wont to claim disgraces he had never committed; and Phyllis had no prior existence.

  “We’ve got to concoct something, Phyl,” Pierce told her. “We’ll have to come up with a credible past that even our own people will believe genuine, and we can’t take anyone else into our confidence.”

  “You’re forgetting Janet,” Phyllis pointed out. “And you certainly can get Cliff to support any story you construct. Cliff surely has access to some men who even in this candid era want to be discreet about their private lives.”

  Pierce had put both these persons on the payroll, Janet as Coordinator of Women’s Affairs and Cliff as general consultant. The latter was feeling better since Pierce had introduced him to the gay Sloan ex-aide Jameson Webb. “Okay, Janet, Cliff, and Cliff’s friends can provide next-door neighbor accounts of your childhood, but some real places must be named, specific addresses, and what about the other people who were living there at the supposed time? And what of school records?”

  “I’ll get on that right away.”

  Phyllis was good as her word. By the following day she had a formulation. “Ellery, I don’t have to remind you that unless you reprogram me, I am obliged to tell the truth. But you and all the rest of our team can enjoy the normal human exercise of lying whenever it suits your purpose. I will refuse to speak of my childhood. You, Janet, Cliff, and company can leak my reason for that refusal: I was the victim of a continuing incestuous relationship into which I was coerced at a young age by a family member.”

  “Who got away with it.”

  “Who died in prison. Of cancer, painfully.”

  “And you don’t want ever to talk about it, so as not to bring shame to your surviving relatives and to your home town, school, ch
urch, et cetera.”

  “That’s about the size of it, Ellery.”

  “But the media can locate the hometowns of Janet and Cliff and the others.”

  “There may be some speculation,” said Phyllis. “But what concerns us is only what effect the story will have on probable voters. Most will be sympathetic and will have a negative reaction to any attempt to embarrass me. So I have concluded, combining what I have learned from an observation of human nature and my study of the popular culture of the last half-century.”

  “I’ll also have the matter of our marriage taken care of, registered legally someplace, in case investigative reporters want to verify it. You don’t have to be concerned with any of this stuff, Phyl,” said Pierce. “I’m not going to change your obligation to tell the truth. It puts the rest of us on our mettle as liars.”

  “I cannot understand that statement at all,” said Phyllis. “But then, I don’t have to.”

  At first, Phyllis’s entrance into the race had the effect of boosting Governor Jack Ransome’s ratings in the polls. Though an extremely dull candidate of the kind that both major parties helplessly nominated from time to time, Ransome was at least an alternative to Joe Sloan, who, exploiting the rare advantage of having a partisan majority in both houses of Congress, had effectively called for doubling federal expenditures for defense and social programs while cutting taxes in half. The result was unprecedented prosperity in his first two years and an everworsening recession that began in the third.

  As distractions Sloan threatened several small African and Caribbean nations, who ignored him, and instigated another sex scandal, but the public remained blasé, even when the First Lady pretended to throw down the last straw and leave him for a while, taking their three youngest children to an undisclosed location, thought to be the Adirondacks. All four had only just returned before the White House dinner to which Phyllis and Pierce were invited.

  Phyllis’s poll numbers did not begin to rise until the supermarket tabloid The Informer published their exposé of her. When word of it was first leaked to Pierce, he feared he had waited too long to make his own move, but such fears proved groundless. The Informer account, headlined IS PHYLLIS A NYMPHOMANIAC?, did not contain a hint of the real story but rather revealed that she had once danced at a strip club and later worked for a phone-sex business, then supposedly went highbrow with a theatrical production of Macbeth, which however was famous for its sex scenes. Of her subsequent movies, only those that emphasized nudity were successful at the box office.

  If it had been The Informer’s purpose to discredit Phyllis (as apparently it was, for the paper was owned by a born-again type who avidly supported the priggish Ransome), the attempt had the reverse effect. Her numbers thereafter climbed. Males were reminded that she was one hot babe, and many women, their indignation fanned by a Janet-organized group of fierce feminists, professed to have been enraged at such a sexist attack on a woman who, after all, had only earned an honest living from the disgusting weaknesses of men.

  Now that Phyllis was proving an ever more dangerous threat, next it was the President’s forces that tried to discredit her on the initiative of First Lady Amber Sloan, who through confidential channels instituted a whispering campaign, echoes of which could be heard in a well-known gossip column, to the effect that Phyllis might be overfond of her fellow-woman. But a Howell Fairchild—launched investigation, the results of which were released to certain influential journalists he had cultivated for years, established that the so-called evidence for the charge consisted only of bad-mouthings by Howard Kidd, with whose provincial theater group Phyllis had done Macbeth years before and who had since been dumped by his rich wife and indicted for statutory rape of a girl who played Juliet in one of his productions.

  The Sloan camp had more success by emphasizing, whenever possible, that Phyllis had devoted her life to her successive careers and, unlike Amber Sloan, who had borne and raised four children, was childless and thus alien to the concept of family that had to a large degree supplanted or anyway vitiated the previous rage for a womanhood of accomplishment beyond nursery or kitchen.

  When the polls and focus groups showed a drop in Phyllis’s support among young married women, Pierce said, “There’s not enough time left for me to make an animatronic child. We got too late a start, Phyl.”

  “But how about an artificial pregnancy, Ellery?”

  “Oh, I guess I could pad your belly, increasing its size regularly, but then what? You would be scheduled to deliver the baby around Election Day. I don’t have enough time for both the campaign and fabricating an animatronic child, not to mention that under media scrutiny such an infant would need to be replaced every few weeks with a slightly larger model, with more hair, et cetera—a massive job, Phyl.”

  “A fake pregnancy could be terminated by a simulated miscarriage, no?”

  “Of course—given the stresses of the campaign, what could be more understandable? The outpouring of sympathy would be overwhelming. For several weeks you would be immune to criticism on any issue.”

  “Moreover,” Phyllis pointed out, “the miscarriage would be brought on by the vicious negative attacks of my opponents.”

  Pierce shook his head in admiration. “Phyllis, you’re too much!”

  “I thought I was just right,” said she. “Else you would make adjustments.”

  When Pierce asked the advisory committee for the names of possible candidates for vice president, there were no ready suggestions.

  This did not surprise Phyllis. “I’ve researched this subject, Ellery. Running mates are normally lifelong members of a party, notable for their loyalty to it. Though they may have been, up to that point, of the faction that earlier opposed the person now nominated for the big job, they are expected henceforth to join hands in partisan unity against the enemy, uncomplainingly assuming the Presidential candidate’s exact position on every issue, especially those that were most fiercely debated during the nominating process by these two very individuals. The reward for the resulting hypocrisy is that the ticket-partner of a victorious President generally has an inside track for his own future bid for the White House.”

  “Where does that leave our problem, Phyl?”

  “We have no party, and thus far I have not expressed an opinion on any issue, so these matters need not be taken into the equation. We can promise a potential vice-presidential candidate that he will have a great opportunity to run on his own eight years from now.”

  Pierce approved of Phyllis’s certainty that she would win the election. With human candidates it is impossible to tell whether their obligatory assurance is sincere or simulated, but as a creation of artifice, Phyllis could afford genuine convictions.

  “You’re saying we have much to offer. But our panel of experts can’t think of anybody to whom the opportunity might appeal. You see, Phyl, the professionals consider the lack of a party a detriment to anyone looking forward to a career in politics.”

  “Of course,” said she. “They are all hacks. What’s needed here, Ellery, is thinking outside the box. We don’t want a career politician with ambitions of his own. We want a regular person, for whom the idea of running for vice president would be entertaining, something different anyway. Whether he campaigns will be irrelevant to the outcome. In office, I will hardly require his services. Aside from presiding over the Senate, he can play golf or fish or whatever he wants to do.”

  As outlandish as the idea sounded when first heard, it became more sensible the longer Pierce considered it. When the committee finally came up with suggested candidates, they were either worn-out has-beens of one party or the other; nowobscure former military leaders; or in one case an eccentric ex-president of an Ivy League university, Zoroastrian, bike-riding, clog-wearing.

  “Let’s face it,” said Howell Fairchild, his white eyebrows rising, “the offer simply does not attract anyone of much potential.” He smiled benignly. “For the reasons previously stipulated.”

  Munr
o T. Wentworth, a pharmacist in a little village in southern Illinois, became Phyllis’s running mate when, suffering from one of the headaches that were routine on the campaign trail, Pierce stopped off to buy Nuprin at Wentworth’s drugstore.

  “Nice little shop you’ve got here. I haven’t ever seen a real soda fountain before.” There was even a pair of those elongated glass globes, hanging from chains, in the show window, one filled with orange-colored fluid, the other with green.

  “You wouldn’t want to make me an offer?” asked the druggist, a comb-over man with a fringe of gray hair and a snub nose. He looked to be in his late forties.

  “You’re being underpriced out of business by the chain pharmacy at the mall.”

  “I shouldn’t admit that if I want to sell the store,” Wentworth sheepishly confessed, “but yes.”

  “I’ll make you a better offer,” said Pierce.

  Wentworth was not as amazed as he might have been, or again perhaps it was rather that he was simply not demonstrative. Whichever, such a low level of emotional energy was all to the good for the role he was being given. With equanimity he accepted the condition that he would remain almost as unobtrusive as he had been as a pharmacist, his reward being a campaign expense account more generous than the revenue his store had brought in in recent years. He didn’t even require his wife’s permission. She had wanted to leave town for the past decade.

  “And don’t worry about the debate, if any,” Pierce assured him. “If there is one, you’ll be coached beforehand. Meanwhile, we’ll furnish you with a standard speech, to be delivered at the places on the itinerary we’ll draw up. Your greatest asset is that you’ve actually done something in real life, unlike either of your opposite numbers, career politicians.”

  Phyllis had yet to state a policy on any issue, Pierce and the advisors, including foremost among them canny old Howell Fairchild, having determined that an inexperienced candidate did better to say too little than too much. No one has ever had to eat unuttered words, and no matter how late a position is taken, it can usually be defended as preferable to a rash rush to judgment. “Let ’em yap,” said Fairchild, “as long as the window of opportunity hasn’t closed. The secret’s in knowing when to drop the ax.”