The Müller-Fokker Effect

by John Sladek

  Putting it off any longer would just be cowardice. Spot’s decision had been made a long time ago: before he had ever heard the story of Samson, before the televised transfiguration and death of Billy Koch: now it was just putting one foot in front of the other and walking toward his goal.

  He waited until after the presumed last bed check (they were too numerous and irregular ever to be sure), collected his money, his comics and a change of underwear (in case he got into an accident on his way to commit suicide), and slipped out. Down the hall, past the cadet officer sleeping by the emergency door, over the spiked iron fence and into town. He caught the midnight bus for Minneapolis.

  He would see Mom first, and explain to her why he was doing it. (1) She would undoubtedly try and talk him out of it, but he would be strong. There were some things, as Col Fouts was always saying, that a man had to do. And Samson had killed himself. And Christ. (2) She would just refuse to let him do it. In that case, he would kill himself on the spot, maybe by a voluntary emission of his soul (John Donne said it could be done). (3) She would understand and give him the money to get to Washington and do it properly.

  He arrived before dawn, saliva running down his neck from sleeping on the bus. The key was in the mailbox. He found the house empty, disused, unfriendly, and after looking all over for Mom, went to sleep on the big bed—on top of the American flag.

  At ten the next morning he was downtown with his little overseas bag, now only partly in uniform. As he stopped to ask a stranger where the National Arsenamid Corporation was (‘the television part’) a familiar car flashed by.

  It was Fouts. He recognized Spot.

  As soon as Fouts saw the kid talking to what could only be a plainclothesman, he knew it was finished.

  ‘O Jesus O Jesus O Jesus O.’

  He ran three red lights getting across town to Phenolphthalein Drive. ‘Oh, yes sir,’ the kid would be saying by now. ‘Yes, I saw the Colonel in women’s clothes.’ And that was that.

  The flight to New York, that was his only chance. Slip in among all the others, a few chameleon changes in and out of drag, into the melting pot…maybe get a studio and hide out as one of them beatnik painter types…that was the life…

  There were three signs above Feinwelt’s desk at Transvestites Anonymous:

  BREAK THE HABIT HABIT!

  SUIT YOURSELF!

  CHANGE INTO WHAT YOU CANNOT ENDURE!

  He sat beneath them like a hostile god, his rippled, ripe old face betraying no sign of forgiveness for the returned prodigal. Fouts laid the pile of nun’s clothes on the desk.

  ‘I guess you expect me to say “Let’s be friends”, eh Foutsy? Not a chance. I know you’re not sorry for what you did (not only to me but to the organization). You just heard about the big New York convention so you came crawling back, hoping I’d ask you to come along. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘I guess so.’ Fouts twisted his overseas cap.

  ‘You know I could have you for assault, indecency, theft, impersonation…’ A long-toothed smile.

  ‘I know, Mother Feinwelt. But I’m in a lot worse trouble right now. I wish the flight was leaving today, instead of next Friday.’

  Feinwelt looked at him closely. Then he seemed to have a change of heart. ‘All right.’ He sighed. ‘You can go. The flight leaves Friday at ten p.m. We’ll all meet here at six p.m., bus out to the airport and check in at seven-thirty. Got that?’

  ‘Thanks, Mother. You’re a pal and I won’t forget this.’ Fouts almost skipped out to his car. As he drove away, he noticed a new, cheap-model car parked across the road, in the shade of a willow. The old couple in it seemed to be necking.

  Hadn’t he seen them here before?

  Just now there were plenty of other things to worry about. Army Security might close in anytime, he had to have a cover story. His sister was visiting him (phone her and set it up) and asked him to help her fix a hem. He’d tried on the dress and at that moment Cadet Shairp had come to the door. Rose was about his size, so any clothes lying around the place could be explained…and when that kid got back to school, there’d be some really beautiful punishment waiting for him…

  By the time Fouts reached the school he felt so good that he allowed himself to break his diet, and gorge an Almond Joy.

  Spot ran. The streets and alleys flashed by, broken scenes and interrupted faces: a man tying his shoelace, a woman paying a taxi, sleep-walking shoppers, a window-cleaner.

  He quit when his side hurt too much, but for the rest of the day he would feel Fouts’s eyes on him, the fat hand clamping down on his shoulder: ‘Well, my boy, have we had enough running away and playing with ourselves?’

  ‘What a cuh-yute lit-tle uniform! What can I do for you, lover?’

  ‘Please, Miss, Fm looking for my mother. She works here.’

  ‘Well what a lucky old mother to have such a cute little sojur like you for a son! What’s her name, lover-sojur?’

  ‘Marge Shairp.’

  As she looked through her files, the receptionist kept embarrassing Spot with winks and puckering gestures. He felt like telling her about his suicide plan (there being some things a man had to do), but shyness shut him up.

  ‘Not listed here, lover-lover. That don’t mean anything, though. Tell you what. You wait right here and I’ll find out which floor she works on. Okay? I’ll be right back.’

  She disappeared down the dim distance of a corridor, though the sound of her heels echoed back long after she was out of sight. Spot decided she was about the sexiest, most sophisticated woman he’d ever met.

  But any second Fouts would come swinging in through the revolving door and grab him. Spot looked over the stuff on the desk: Lists of numbers, offices and phones. Bound folders (no time to open them), an artificial flower and a tiny notebook full of florid handwriting. The capitals were all curlicues and extra loops, and the dots over the i’s were little circles.

  ‘Daisy James by Henry Miller…’

  Nothing there. He went back to the lists. Studio A and Studio B were both on the fifth floor. That would probably be it.

  With the feeling that Fouts was right behind him, he fled up the dim STAFF ONLY stairway.

  It was really dark in Studio A, dark and churchy. There was even a bluish vigil light that turned out to be, when he got closer, a pilot light on an ordinary stove. Instead of arches and columns, there were huge tall pieces of kitchen everywhere, and each piece was complete as a chapel, with sink, stove, table, window and landscape painted just behind the glass. The water worked and the stove lighted. He thought of the dark, dusty kitchen at home, the refrigerator full of stale secrets…he knelt at a formica table, rested his forehead against the chrome edge, and asked God to help him find his mother.

  Something in the darkest corner clicked, hummed, stopped. Spot made his way over to it stepping over a few blacksnake cables on the concrete floor.

  It was an enormous new deep-freeze, bigger than a coffin. It took him a minute or two to work out the complicated catch and raise the lid. A light came on, and he looked in.

  ‘The fast trains retarded kids,’ said Wise Bream agreeably. He spoke as always ambiguously and apropos of nothing. Three Dollars and Twenty Cents settled into the seat beside him, chuckling.

  ‘You really had ‘em fooled, you clever bastard. Even me. I thought for awhile you might be a god or something.’

  The conductor came past, calling for tickets. He coughed, seeing the handcuffs. Naturally he asked the white man if the Indian were his prisoner.

  ‘No, as it so happens,’ Three said. ‘As it so happens, this man is an escaped loony. I’m taking him back to his nuthatch in Washington.’

  ‘Say, I don’t think…’

  ‘He’s not dangerous, don’t let it worry you. Never harmed a fly, did you, General Custer? That’s who he thinks he is, General Custer.’

  ‘The crossing kids train,’ said Wise, grinning hideously. The conductor hurried on.

  ‘What a messed-up face,’ he
thought, locking himself in the next car. ‘What a mean son of a bitch he must be. Big, too.’

  The train jolted into motion, and so did the rest of the Utopi, on the platform. They began to wave, and their god smiled and waved back.

  ‘I’m worried.’ Seldom From frowned at the two grinning faces in the window. ‘I wish we could have sent our god along to Washington with anybody but Three-Twenty.’

  Fake Sky clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t be an old man about this, Seld. Who else knows the ins and outs of politics well enough to go along? Besides, it’s good to have Three-twenty out of the way for awhile. Always criticizing!’

  ‘I know, I know, but somehow I never can shake the feeling that Three is a bad injun. He’s never been off the reservation before, don’t forget, and he’s got a lot of money in his jeans.’

  ‘We’ve been through all this as many times as the Moon has children, Seld: We need a strong lobby in Washington to get some changes made back here. Why should we live on Second World War C-rations the Army admits are unpalatable? Why shouldn’t we have mineral rights on our own reservation, instead of the Lion Oil Company? Why can’t we get our tractor fixed? It stands to reason to send in our best men.’

  ‘That’s right, Seld.’ Someone Else spat off the platform. The wind whirled the lacy gobbet clear across the tracks. ‘Remember, Three-Twenty’s no moth when it comes to brains.’

  ‘So he says himself.’

  On the train Three Dollars and Twenty Cents laughed again. ‘Listen, old God. You ought to see what I’ve got planned for us when we get to Washington. Fm going to show you off on street corners: Wise Bream, the Indian Oracle. I’ll make enough to get me a Brooks Brothers’ suit. Then we’ll be where the action is! We’ll be on east street, in the land of milk and honey, the gravy train, wow, under the money tree!’

  Twenty-One

  Thursday night, Wes Davis’s White Shirt party held a mammoth torchlight parade in Washington, a preliminary to their party convention. Chanting that they were neither red nor black nor yellow, ten thousand White Shirts bore fire toward the Capitol. Wes rode in an armored cat in front. Behind was another, containing an enormous petition which, it was said, had a million signatures.

  The petition asked for the abolition of Negroes.

  A series of dramatic floats worked variations on the theme, ‘A Final Solution to the Negro Problem’. A slave ship marked BOUND FOR AFRICA held its cargo of men in blackface grimacing through portholes, while above decks the jolly crew of smiling bikini-blondes prettily plied sextant, wheel and telescope.

  The FINAL SOLUTION MACHINE was likewise ‘manned’. This was a large, silvery box with rotating cogs at the sides. Two bikini-blondes cranked it. Al Jolsons were herded in at one end and canned goods came out at the other.

  Another float suggested torments awaiting Negroes in the next world. It was a great furnace with many doors that now and then swung shakily open on red glowing scenes; here the b-b’s were equipped with horns and pitchforks, and twirled their tails suggestively as they stoked the crepe-paper fires.

  Another depicted the ‘Four L’s’ of the Wes Davis code: ‘Label ‘em, Loath ‘em, Larrup ‘em and Lynch ‘em,’ in four tableaux (more b-b’s, more dismayed minstrels) while on the sides of the float the four L’s were arranged in a clever design that reminded some onlookers of a kind of wheel radiating four feet.

  Many a papier-mâché lamppost twined with paper flowers held its black effigy surrounded by still more b-b’s, but the poor girls on one float, whose lamppost had broken down, smiled through tears. The crowd gave them a big hand, brave little troupers that they were.

  Then came a giant replica of Wes himself, twenty feet tall and straddling a white stallion nearly fifteen feet tall. He and the horse were formed entirely of lilies; the crowd was still complaining about the smell when the vanguard of the White Shirts marched by.

  They sang a bouncy, drum-and-bugle version of the National Anthem, with a few words changed here and there. As it came out, what F. Scott Key was watching o’er the ramparts was not the flag but the gallantly streaming smoke from a Wes Davis factory for turning Negroes into scouring products.

  The marching was superb, a precise goose-step, and the banners and torches inspired awe. But something was wrong with the singing. Partly this was due to many of the White Shirts relapsing into their childhood versions of the anthem. Yet thousands of bystanders later swore they heard a third version:

  Ofay can you pee

  Through the dong’s surly blight

  What you probably inhaled

  At the toilet’s last cleaning?

  It was senseless to some, filthy to most, and disgusting to all White Shirt sympathizers in the crowd, listing as it did a few likely perversions of the WASP element. A great many potential friends were lost to the White Shirt cause that night by the simple substitution of chancre for banner. There might be a black conspiracy, but this was going too far…and what was the point of it all?

  The point of it all was that over eight thousand of the White Shirts were not bona fide members at all. Over four thousand were not even white. A breakdown by singer and song might have looked like this:

  A few informed news sources; suspected there might be trouble coming. A news analyst wondered why the White Shirts had chosen Washington DC for their convention—hardly good taste. Other newsmen ignored the whole thing as much as possible, and concentrated on other news, of the ‘human’ interest variety: The President’s cold, the appearance of cherry blossoms, a transvestite convention in New York, a talking bear at the zoo.

  The White Shirts left their huge scroll on the Capitol steps, to be delivered next morning. It demanded, among other things, the immediate accession of the President in favor of Wes Davis. The Senate subcommittee who later examined it would find among its million signers surprisingly few hand-writing styles. Moreover, sections of it looked copied from telephone books, death rolls, Who’s Who, the litany of the saints, the Declaration of Independence and even a catalogue of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks in London. Senator Vuje would have a hard time explaining away the signatures of St Christopher, John Hancock, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford and Dr Crippen.

  The following afternoon, Fouts arrived at Transvestites Anonymous with his gear and a supply of candy bars. The old couple were still necking out front when he unlocked the door and let himself in. Did they come here every day, or what? (Something about them gave him an uneasy feeling—later.)

  The place was deserted. Dust covers on the office typewriters, chairs turned up on tables in the coffee room, bulletin board cleared off, nothing in any locker but his—no sign of humanity but a broken earring pendant in the hallway.

  He sat down at Feinwelt’s desk to think. A raid? No, too tidy. Today was Saturday? His calendar watch assured him it was Friday. Maybe he was too early? But where was everyone’s luggage, then? Maybe they send it on ahead?

  He picked up the phone to dial Feinwelt’s downtown office. It made a guy jittery, sitting around here all alone, what with Army Security probably watching his every…

  To Fouts’s trained ear, even over the dial tone, came the unmistakable ping of a direct wire tap. He hung up at once, feeling the uniform tighten over his chest and crotch.

  Bad news. They were this far already, tapping the phone at the one place he’d always felt safe. So now what? Sit here and let them close in? ‘Just tell us in your own words, Colonel—how long have you been a fucking fruit?’ No, better to die than…better to wait.

  There was always the payphone on the corner. He peered cautiously out the Venetian blinds. The old woman was alone in the car now…

  But she was training a pair of binoculars on him!

  ‘Don’t think of it as drag,’ he said to himself, fumbling in his locker. ‘Think of it as a disguise.’

  ‘Get down off the pole quick, Grover! Someone’s coming out!’

  Grover jumped down, pulled off his headset and scrambled into the car. An odd figure in a wh
ite hoopskirt came floating out of the building and across the lawn to the phone booth.

  ‘Something funny about that woman…’ Grover mused.

  ‘You noticed it too? That’s no woman, Grover. It’s a man!’

  ‘Nawww, really?’

  ‘I’ll stake my new glasses on it. It’s the same man who went in. The Army officer. Just look how he waddles!’

  ‘Perty new at disguises, I guess. And yet he’s smart enough to use an outside line, so we can’t tap it. He looks to be a bad one, Amy. And to think, he’s in the Yuhnited States Army!’

  ‘He’s the same officer we saw earlier this week, Grover. It’s a relief to know they haven’t penetrated the army any deeper than that.’

  ‘I think we got ‘em on the run, now. They’re resorting to disguises, so they must be worried.’

  ‘Shall we tell the FBI now, Grover?’

  ‘I—just a sec. He’s writing something on the wall of that phone booth, Amy. I want to get a look at that.’

  Using a coin, Fouts scratched his initial in the aluminum wall, just below a sign: ‘Wouldn’t some loved one love to hear from you right now?’ Feinwelt’s office phone rang for the seventy-fourth time.

  ‘You son of a bitch, where are you?’ He hung up. There was nothing to do but go back and wait, under the needling stare of the ‘old folks’.

  He went back, walking daintily, not daring to look up and see those binoculars. In the rec room, he stretched out on a sofa, switched on the TV and went to sleep. It would be all right when Feinwelt and the boys got here…it had to be all right…the news commentator was rattling on…trouble in Washington…

  The mark was like this:

  ‘Pi? Amy, this is it! Either that guy we just saw was none other than the ringleader, Pé himself, or else he was talking to Pé on the telephone! Back to the car, Amy. Just had another idea. Did we bring my deciphering books? Good.’