The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “Evil chick!” I said approvingly.

  Panther-eyes and a Cheshire-cat smile leered back.

  In the little room next to the john, there was a table piled with coats, a couple of people I didn’t know, and Ted and Doris. Ted gave me a what-have-we-here look as I took off my black coat revealing my black clothes underneath; Doris looked at Robin, then at me, then shook her head and rolled her eyes.

  “Robin, Ted and Doris Clayton, old friends of mine.” I helped her take the peacoat off and threw it down on the table over mine.

  Ted gave Robin a leer that a couple of years ago would’ve set me to grinding my teeth and Doris to chain-smoking and anticipating a nightmare evening. But neither of us were uptight now, not even when Robin gave him a super-fey smile. Evil chick that she was, Robin seemed disappointed at not getting a rise out of Doris. Poor fucking Ted!

  “Hey man,” Ted said, “gotta talk to you for a minute. Doris, why don’t you take Robin on in to the party—”

  I nodded okay to Robin; she nodded back and I dug how Ted was impressed by the number as Doris led Robin out of the room. Ted pulled me into a corner away from the table as people came into the room, undressed, and left in a continuous stream.

  “Why the shades, as if I didn’t know,” Ted said.

  “You got it,” I told him.

  “Harvey isn’t gonna like you’re coming here stoned.”

  “Fuck Harvey. I paid my fifty bucks. Besides man, I can maintain.”

  Ted grimaced. “Sure you can,” he said. “But what about Arlene? She’s gonna go through the roof when she sees you here with that Robin chick....”

  “You were never one to let something like that bother you, Ted.”

  Ted smiled a poor little ghost-smile of pussy-past. “Got to admit that’s a mighty fine looking piece of ass you got there. Looks like she fucks like an angel.”

  I licked my lips. “Like a devil,” I said.

  Ted grinned. “That’s what I mean.”

  For auld lang syne, I faked a nervous smile, said: “That’s my turf, Ted.”

  “If I weren’t a happily married man—”

  My guts cried out in pain for him. Knowing I was on safe ground and sad for it, I said: “You can have her man, courtesy of the house in memory of the chicks you steered to me.”

  Ted blanched and I hated The Man in Black for his sly cruelty.

  “If you’re ready to fight me for her with pistols at ten paces, that is,” I drawled, letting him off the hook. Friendship can sure go through some funny changes. I had the awful feeling Ted had picked up on every nuance, but of course he couldn’t and wouldn’t and shouldn’t make a sign. I just couldn’t take that.

  “Looks more like it’ll be Robin and Arlene with pistols,” Ted said. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Don’t you dig having chicks fight over you?”

  Ted sighed. Laughed. Frowned. “I don’t know about Robin, but you sure could blow your thing with Arlene this way.”

  “If it blows her mind, that’s only fair,” I told him. “She’s sure fucked around enough with my head.”

  “This is gonna be one interesting party,” Ted said.

  “Well let’s not keep the animals waiting,” I told him.

  Through the black glass of my shades the decadence of the big crowded room took on the ominous funky tones of a Berlin-in-the-twenties movie. Sitting on the lip of the dais in his baggy pants and decaying shirt, Harvey was the prototypical streetcorner Hitler rapping with Linda Kahn, Ida, O’Brien, Weeping Willy Nelson, Jeannie Goodman, and a few other gray losers, all dreaming of the day when the sewers of the universe would boil their muck out into the dim light of what passed for reality. Rich Rossi and a weird-looking science fiction fan (with him, it was a whole career) named Chester White were squatting on the floor trying to make a couple of fat female pimples. Charley Dees and a couple of other lushes were swilling beer decked out on the table in the back of the room. A few scattered noncouples were twitching in the gloom like terminal paretics to the low-fi Muzak-rock coming from the phonograph. The rest of the room was pretty well filled with clots of pudding-faced clots discussing whatever pudding-faced clots discuss. All very dim and shadowy through the shades like a worn-out film-clip from an ancient Polack remake of La Dolce Vita.

  Over in a corner, Doris and Robin were rapping on each other. Couldn’t hear them, but I could tell from their faces that it was a noncontest of one-upmanship: Robin trying to out-freak Doris (no contest) and Doris out-mothering this poor deluded chile (also no contest).

  Robin smiled at me as Ted and I reached them. “Welcome to the cartoon,” she said.

  My head did a flip-flop. The unreality of the whole scene washed over me in india ink. Tuning in to the sounds in the room, it seemed like a million ducks were quacking. Over at the table, was an assembly line of beer-drinking mechanisms: constructs consisting of arms to grab beer cans, mouths connected to tubes to convey the beer to bladders, legs to walk the bladders to the john, spigots to piss the beer into hidden tubing that led under the bowels of the Earth back to the beer factory. Machines running in a closed circuit. Dancing robots slightly out of sync. Plastic music like a crumbling player piano. People milling back and forth on hidden tracks in the floor, rearing, gesturing and making mouth-noises at preprogrammed points like the mechanical bears in Coney Island penny arcade shooting galleries. Old Uncle Harvey’s Bavarian cuckoo clock, with dozens of near lifelike metal figures moved by creaky clockwork through a complete cycle every hour on the hour.

  “You ever been to San Francisco?” Ted was saying to Robin. I could see the clockwork moving his mouth as the piano roll Harvey had put into his head sent him through his paces.

  “What’s with this San Francisco thing?” said The Man in Black, trying to toss a handful of sand into the mechanism.

  “I’ve really been thinking about San Francisco,” the Ted-machine said. “The Foundation would be—”

  “Much better off in San Francisco than New York,” I said, causing the gears of his speech-box to slip a few teeth.

  “Yeah! You know, we really could move the whole Foundation to San Francisco. I mean, a cross-country trek together, just like old pioneers....”

  “You talked to Harvey about this?” I asked.

  “I’ve tried to,” the Ted-thing said. “But he acts kinda funny about it... sort of puts me off...”

  “Or puts you on.”

  “What do you mean, puts me on!” Ted said. “He’s just not ready to consider it yet... but I get the feeling that if enough of us really commit ourselves to making the move, Harvey would go along for the good of everyone.”

  “‘Please, please, don’t throw me in dat ol’ briar patch,’ said Brer Rabbit.”

  “What’s the matter with you tonight, Tom?” Doris’ Earthmother tape subsystem caused her vocal mechanism to say.

  “I guess I just got the Old Piano Roll Blues,” said The Man in Black.

  “Can we go look at the monkey cage now, Daddy?” Robin said, pulling me toward the crowded center of the room.

  “Evil chick,” I explained over my shoulder to Ted and Doris.

  “Evil chick,” I whispered to Robin, grabbing the cleft of her ass and holding it hard for a long moment as she dragged me by her ass and my free hand toward the gaggle of listening-machines surrounding Harvey.

  “I’m an evil chick with a tasty ass!” she said loudly, causing heads to turn.

  “That’s the best kind,” I said, giving her a slow, exaggerated, ultra-conspicuous feel before I let go.

  I could feel a wall of eyes behind us as we threaded our way through the clockwork machinery toward Harvey and his mechanical worshippers; clockwork eyes watching The Man in Black and his Evil Chile as we moved in a train of darkness across the room. Maybe the gears were grinding a little (The Man in Black not programmed on the Old Piano Roll Blues) like seeing characters drawn in Crypt of Terror style popping into their Feiffer cartoon. Uptight, they w
ere: “Get back in your own cartoon!” Because digging The Man in Black & Co. drawn in contrasting style meant the realization that other cartoon-realities existed meaning that maybe their own Harvey Brustein cuckoo-clock mechanism was not Total Reality after all, in which case—“Help! I’m trapped into a Bavarian cuckoo-clock factory!”

  Into the current inner circle: Ida and her fat hausfrau friend; O’Brien, Myra Golden, a fat blond chick in a circus-tent mumu (moo-moo); Weeping Willy Nelson; a couple of mindless college twerps; Donald Warren, the Foundation’s sanitized token Negro; an aesthetic faggot; and Linda-uptight-Kahn, all standing at the bottom of the little dais with Harvey standing on the platform itself about six inches above them and outside the mechanism.

  Outside the mechanism! By God, old Harv was outside his mechanism! I had wondered about that: it was theoretically possible for the cuckoo-clock maker to end up incorporated in his own mechanism (a la Adolf Hitler-Mickey Spillane-The Doors & Co. at one time or another) in which case Harvey would be running off his own set of piano rolls meaning that he couldn’t change anyone else’s piano rolls meaning that predestination would be a self-programmed invariant. But no, Free Will was alive in Argentina—no clockwork behind Harvey’s eyes.

  “No, Mike, the job situation is about the same in San Francisco as it is here,” Harvey was saying.

  “It’s just as... cosmopolitan as New York,” said the aesthetic faggot (meaning the San Fran vice squad languished not for lack of pederastic clientele), “but more... in time...”

  “Yes, San Francisco is as much a city as New York,” Harvey conceded, “but the Bay Area as a whole is as spread out and varied as Los Angeles...”

  By God, I had caught Harvey red-handed in the act of changing piano rolls! Cleverly inserting a groove-behind San-Francisco piano roll into each individual subsystem. Had to admire, in a technical sense, the subtlety of the programming, considering the crudity of the clockwork he was working with. Instead of changing the Master Piano Roll of the whole Foundation cuckoo clock (which would have jarred the individual member-mechanisms, possibly introducing selfawareness glitches into the program), he was changing the individual piano rolls one by one so that they would all demand a change in the Master Piano Roll themselves while still believing in Free Will. Put that in your hash-pipes and smoke it, Free Thinkers: illusion of Free Will can be programmed into a predestined piano roll complex!

  But The Man in Black danced to no Piano Roll Blues. “You’re changing the piano rolls!” he said.

  Linda-uptight-Kahn turned into an eyeball-to-shades confrontation with The Man in Black. She goggled. “What the hell is that get-up?” her vocal mechanism said.

  “You’ve heard of the traje de luces,” I said, “the suit of lights?”

  “Well, the man is wearing a suit of Darkness,” said Robin. The chick was clearly telepathic on the blacker wavelengths.

  “And who is that?” said the Linda-thing.

  “Some crazy hippy he dragged here,” said Ida.

  “You’re avoiding the issue,” I informed them. “Don’t you notice that old Harv, the master-programmer of this cuckoo-clock, is changing your piano rolls?”

  “Piano rolls?”

  “He’s under the influence,” O’Brien said paternally.

  “Under the influence of what?” said the margarine voice of Ida’s hausfrau friend.

  “It is you who are under the influence,” said The Man in Black. “You are all under the influence of the Piano Roll Blues. In fact, you’ve all been incorporated into Old Uncle Harvey’s Black Forest cuckoo-clock mechanism while your backs were turned.”

  The aesthetic faggot rolled his pretty blue eyes at me, sucked in a little reverse-kiss: a Brotherhood of Grass secret catacombs recognition signal.

  “Cuckoo clock?” Harvey said with a vapid little smile, mistakenly shifting to a humor-the-drunk mode. General metallic laughter from all voice-box systems.

  “Come on, Harvey,” I said, “stop putting us on. You’re not in your own cuckoo clock, you’re outside the mechanism. You’re changing the piano rolls. You’re punching in a Let’s-Go-To-San Francisco program.”

  “Are you all right, Tom?” Harvey said earnestly. “You seem rather—”

  “Ah, so this is the world-famous Harvey Brustein!” Robin exclaimed. “You’ve got a funny cartoon going here, man!”

  “And who are you, young lady?” Harvey said coldly, appraising her financial potential with a pawnbroker’s eye and finding her wanting.

  “I’m not a young lady,” Robin said. “I’m an evil chick and a dope-fiend and a perverted degenerate.”

  “Crazy hippy,” said Ida.

  “Not as crazy as you are, Prune-face,” Robin said. “Yeah, now I recognize the style—it’s Dick Tracy. Prune-face and B-B Eyes and Flattop and B.O. Plenty. A paranoid narc’s nightmare cartoon.” She studied Harvey. “Hey man,” she told him, “you don’t belong in this cartoon; you’re drawn in the wrong style. You belong in Terry and the Pirates or something—you’re an Oriental Menace.”

  “He’s the Programmer,” I explained.

  “Programmer...? Oh, I dig—he’s the cartoonist!”

  “Who... who is this creature?” a quavering girl’s voice said from behind me. My arm brushing Robin’s waist, I turned to face Arlene. She looked silly and unreal in a white blouse and blue skirt and honey-blond hair and those intellectual bullshit glasses—the All-American Semi-Bohemian College Girl. Her jaw was hard and cold as a bear-trap and her green eyes were trying their best to be cool and not making it.

  “Arlene,” I said, easing our nasty little threesome out to the periphery of the Mystic Circle, “meet Robin. Robin, meet Arlene.”

  The mechanisms around Harvey looked everywhere but where they really wanted to, going into an ignore-the-bad-scene program.

  “Interesting...” Robin said, studying Arlene like a side of beef. “Not bad.” She smiled pseudo-possessively at me. “I see your taste is totally depraved,” she said.

  Arlene opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, like a beached fish. “How... how could you?” she finally said unimaginatively. She stared daggers at Robin, who smiled cherubically back.

  “How could I what?” said the Innocent Man in Black.

  Arlene looked around frantically: a signal pleading for Private Words.

  “Go make some waves for a while,” I whispered into Robin’s ear and sent her on her merry way with a little secret touch of tongue-to-ear. I shunted Arlene off to a quiet little corner far from the maddening crowd.

  “Who is that girl?” Arlene hissed at me as I stood with my back against the wall, screened from the party by her rigid, uptight body.

  “What do you mean, who is that girl?” drawled The Man in Black. “Name is Robin. She’s an evil street-creature.”

  —Over Arlene’s shoulder, I clocked Robin standing over Rich Rossi and Chester White sitting on the floor trying to make the two pimple-things. The pimples were very uptight as Rich and Chester stared up at Robin with drooling eyes—

  “You know what I mean!” Arlene said.

  “No, I don’t know what you mean. And I don’t think you know what you mean, either.” Was Arlene a clockwork creature wired into the mechanism? I could sense clockwork behind her eyes, but kind of blurry....

  —Robin said something to Rich and he went pale. Chester laughed and said something leering to Robin. Robin said something back. Chester turned green. Both of them returned their attentions to the pimples—

  “Stop gibbering at me, damn you!” Arlene said. Real unprogrammed tears rusted the mechanisms behind her eyes. Could I freak her out of it, blow the old Piano Roll Blues out of her mind? Shit, if I couldn’t freak hard enough in my present state, I’d never be able to do it straight!

  “I’m not gibbering,” I said. “I’m in tune with the harmonic structure of the universe, is all, making me telepathic, homeopathic, and a little psychopathic. Like I know what you really want to ask is: namely, why am I here with
Another Woman?”

  —Robin talking to another faggot, Mannie Davis, a closet-queen with a wife and a son he found a wee bit too succulent. Rhoda Steiner, Hilda Charles, Claude West, and a few other would-be-hip types looking on—

  “You call that creature a woman?” Arlene’s voice mechanism said—clearly a Jealous Cattiness Piano Roll in action. Ambiguity here: Arlene capable of unprogrammed emotion but expressed only through programmed responses. Environment producing spontaneous emotions which immediately get shunted into the gears of Harvey’s cuckoo clock and come out in the form of preprogrammed responses.

  “You are jealous,” I said.

  —Robin smiled, put her hand square on the secret faggot’s crotch. Mannie Davis smiled sadly (“If only you were a boy, my dear!”), would-be-hip types totally grossed out—

  “Of course I’m jealous!” Arlene said. Ah, now that was a genuine protoplasmic response! No clockwork there. “Why the hell shouldn’t I be jealous? That take the key to my apartment business and then you show up at a party you know I’ll be at with... with... some crazy unwashed street-bitch!”

  “But you didn’t take the key, now did you?”

  Arlene hesitated as if her mechanism were trying to come up with an appropriate piano roll and coming up dry. Had The Man in Black succeeded in throwing a monkey-wrench into the clockwork?

  —Robin was now talking to Ted over by the beer table. Smiling hot looks at him. Ted was making eyes back. Where was Doris?—

  “I just don’t see where you can afford to put down Robin,” I said. “Where do you come off blaming me for being here with her? I asked you to more or less be my woman and you just fed it into the old Foundation clockwork soul-grinder and copped out on me according to some preprogrammed response-pattern. What the hell did you expect?”

  “I... I didn’t exactly say no...” Arlene said defensively.

  “You didn’t exactly say yes.”

  —Robin leaned up against Ted and purred like a pussy. Ted seemed to be enjoying it, but his eyes were all over the room. Looking for Doris? Or me?—