The Müller-Fokker Effect (9 page)

‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP
! I’m warning you.’

‘Exactly. Since your father is dead, there is no one else to warn. Since your mother is too ill to stand as a father-surrogate…’

‘YOU LEAVE MY MOTHER OUT OF THIS!’

‘But that’s exactly what
you’re
trying to do—leave her out of things. To punish her for, as you imagine, trying to take the place of your father. You think her cancer is a sibling-substitute, a possible baby brother…’

‘SHUT UP!’

‘Tut. A little respect, Glen boy. Or I’ll take away—this!’ He seized the jade mermaid and made a theatrical gesture of pocketing it. Glen jumped him and the two men fell over the coffee table, releasing a stack of
Stagmans
which flopped and sprawled around their struggling feet.

‘Take my lighter, you son of a bitch?’

‘Is it so important?’

‘It’s mine!’

The machine began coming to pieces in their hands. Feinwelt, holding the biggest piece, cracked the raging editor behind the neck with it.

‘Don’t apologize,’ he said when Glen came to. ‘It was all part of your therapy. Well, I see our fifty minutes are up. Same time tomorrow, okay?’

‘Nnnnhnm.’

Marge held up a package of frozen peas.

‘Here’s great news for housewives!’ she cried.

‘Here’s
GREAT
news for housewives!’

‘Here
IS
great news for housewives!’

‘HERE’S
great news for housewives!’

‘Here’s great news for HOUSEwives!’

There were six syllables to the announcement. Each might be said in one of three pitches; with low, ordinary or high volume; drawled out, chopped short or said normally; said with or without a smile and with or without a gesture. That made, they told her, a total of over one and a half trillion ways of saying it, and Marge feared somehow they might make her try them all.

Mr Bradd explained that a few hundred would suffice. ‘We need enough good takes to get a fix on you with our computer editor,’ he said. ‘That does all the pit work. We just get a few sets of good visual and a few of good sound. Then the computer chops and blends it all, to come up with what the fans think they want. Or what the computer thinks they think.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Mr Bradd drove an imaginary golf ball and watched his follow-through. ‘An ad used to be made up, shipped out and that was that. We keep a finger on ratings and sales, and we do polls. If we find out that, say, a smile just on the word “fabulous” pulls sales in Oregon, then we plug that into the computer and it makes up a special video tape for just Oregon. Whatever we learn, we ask for, and the old computer comes up with it. Of course we still have to shoot the stuff, and have some idea of what we want in the first place. And we do need you. You can never really get along without the human element.’ That was Bradd’s favorite line, from an old company training film he’d written years ago.

‘Hey!’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’d better get some shuteye, teammate. Tomorrow’s a big one. See you in the makeup section at eight.’

‘Good night, Mr Bradd.’

“Night, pal.’ He patted her buttocks in a comradely fashion.

Marge went home to study her lines for the following day. No letter from Spot again. An unhappy mask looked back at her from the mirror. It moved, intoning again and again, ‘It’s so easy with KREW! It’s
magic!’

At six hundred hours the first bell rings.

Spot (Cadet Sturgemoore Shairp) gets out of bed in the approved manner, first untying the thongs that fasten his wrists to the top side of the blanket, then placing his left foot on the floor (counting off the toes aloud as they touch in order), then pivoting smartly so as to come to attention in a full brace. There are seven wrinkles under his chin, the cleft between his shoulder blades can grip a ping-pong ball, his stomach is sucked in and his elbows make 150° angles.

He holds this position while General Rockstone bellows the morning invocation over the video address system (a cadet is not allowed to look at the screen). Then Spot makes his bed with mitered corners, sweeps his room (beginning at the Northwest corner, in honor of Rockstone’s home state, Alaska) and returns to attention.

At the next bell, he is allowed forty-five seconds to go to the toilet, one minute to shower, and one minute to get into his uniform (tucking in the shirt with wooden paddles). Next, inspection.

Gen. Flamel (‘Rocky’) Rockstone was retiring as president of the St Praetexta Military Academy, and Lt Col Algernon Fouts was taking his place. The entire cadre had assembled on the parade ground, in wind and drizzle, to hear the shrill voice of the cadet colonel read the official history of Rocky’s major (indeed his only) engagement in World War Two:

The US held a chain of Pacific islands known as the Corydons. All but one small island at the end of the chain (thought to be uninhabitable) had been fully cleared and turned to military uses. On the last day of the war, Rocky (then a lieutenant) and thirty men were being ferried by plane from a base in the Corydons to a distant fleet. The plane passed over the entire island chain, flying low and taking of course no evasive action. When it reached the last, Sweet Potato Island, the sky around it was suddenly filled with small-arms fire.

The pilot was killed at once. The wounded co-pilot just managed to crash-land in a thicket. And on VJ Day Rocky and his new command found themselves in the hands of the enemy.

The loss of their plane was somehow undetected—perhaps everyone had been indoors listening to the capitulation on shortwave—and no one came looking for them.

Here the official account was a list of hideous tortures, heroic sacrifices and so on, and it stressed the bravery of Lt Rockstone. What made the tortures unendurable was their taking place within sight of a US naval base on the next island. Rocky and his group were able to see ships come and go, planes skywriting V’s, and even hear victory salutes. They themselves were well hidden in the jungle, and their captors, a stubborn and self-sufficient unit, refused to believe what was obviously true. The plane was assumed lost at sea, and, due to Japanese and American clerical errors, rescue took well over a year.

While they listened to the official account, many of the cadets turned their thoughts to the other, unofficial, version they had read last night after lights-out. It mentioned no tortures. It said in fact that Rocky and his men were treated well by the Japanese, who starved themselves to give them the choicest food, saw to their health, cleanliness and well-being, and even made small gifts of money. It seemed these Japanese soldiers had been without women for some time…

But this was only a schoolboy version, written ungrammatically and typed out in many smudgy carbons, read by flashlights under the blankets. None who read it could really believe all of it.

The shrill voice stopped, and the band, their instruments untuned by the cold, struck up a warped march. The whole school marched past the reviewing stand, past the bunting bearing the school motto (‘Those who say we are women are liars’ was the translation) and once around the parade ground. There were three large rectangles each composed of four small rectangles, each in turn composed of four marching lines of ten children each. One was Spot. He could be easily singled out, had anyone been looking, as the one who changed step every four or five paces, and always unsuccessfully. No one, however, was looking.

Fouts suppressed a yawn. ‘What are your plans, General?’

‘I’m supposed to command a new outfit, X Forces, but I don’t know any more about it than you do. All I know is, we assemble in Florida and await orders from the Pentagon. From that gentleman soldier, General Weimarauner.’ He grimaced. ‘Keep all that under your hat, of course.’

‘Of course.’

The general turned his toothless profile to watch the kids. ‘These boys are pretty easy to handle. About all you have to do is drill the heck out of them and keep them from playing with themselves.’

Rocky considered playing with oneself sinful, weakening, deleterious to physical and mental health, and probably the main cause of syphilis, so-called ‘thalidomide babies’, divorce and losing battles.

Accordingly he forbade solitary showers, toilet doors, single rooms, photographs of any females except mothers, lectures in human biology, dirty jokes, obscene language and possession of any object that might conceivably be used in masturbation. Shower and toilet time were strictly limited, and touching one’s own unclothed body minimized.

Most jacking off, therefore, went on in the library at study time. Nearly every cadet who was old enough jazzed the bottom of a table while staring blankly at
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
or Herodotus.

The library was a large drafty room dominated by Rocky’s favorite picture, a painting of Galahad inscribed:

‘Another thing,’ said the general. ‘Watch out for letters home. Censor them. Remember, parents magnify the slightest complaint.’

Fouts jutted his chin in a tight-collar gesture. ‘But don’t the parents wonder when they get a blacked-out letter?’

‘I didn’t mean like military censorship. I meant, if you get a letter that isn’t right, throw it out. I’ve had one kid here writing three letters a week
begging
his mother to take him home. Well, naturally,
that
kind of thing…’

‘Naturally, sir. I don’t believe in coddling America’s next generation of fighting men.’

Wes Davis thought she was just about the whitest woman he’d ever seen. There seemed to be a special message for him alone in the way she held up a slip and said,
‘DRIX
just
eats
dirt! Your white undies will be whiter than Heaven knows!’

One of the other prisoners in the recreation lounge made the mistake of saying something about getting in her undies. It took a guard and three trustees to pull Wes off him.

Later Wes calmed himself enough to read his cellmate a little of the book he was working on:

‘The difference between a nigro and us is like between a skyscraper and a mud hut or a moon rocket and a spear, or God Almighty and a wood baboon. If you wanted a computer, who would you go to a black African country or our Great Nation? If you wanted a constitution a painting or a poem who would you ask some black savage with a bone through his nose or a white man like Tom Jefferson, Norm Rockwell or Ed Guest? Can we go on listening to the syphilitic Europeans and Communist junky perverts who insist the nigro is our equal? He is not our equal because he is not even human!

‘What human could live the way the colored do in Harlem—six or ten to a room? And in Calcutta and Tokyo even more! What human could work for the wages of a black in South Africa—$10 a month! And how about savage rhythm music and cannibalism?

‘Let’s look at some of the nigros’ heroes. George Washington Carver introduced the peanut, a plant whose vines soon killed off the cotton and made land worthless! Peanut vines wrapped themselves around the great heart of the South, choking her to death!’

‘By God, Wes, I never thought of that!’ The cellmate slapped his denimed thigh. ‘Peanuts!’

‘Statistics show,’ Wes read, ‘peanut brittle is a major cause of tooth decay in children, and peanut butter causes malnutrition.’ He looked up. ‘Ever notice how it sticks to the roof of your mouth?’

‘Like a parasite!’

‘Thou hast said it. It
is
a parasite, introduced by the nigger conspiracy to wipe us out. Kids have died injecting peanut butter into their veins! And think of the old people, struggling with glued-up dentures.’

‘By God, Wes, that’s right! Peanuts even have their own comic strip, I hear!’

Wes read:
‘GET THE OLD PEOPLE AND CHILDREN FIRST
, &
YOU PARALYZE THE NATION
. So goes the motto of the Great Nigro Conspiracy.’

He was not reading to his cellmate to entertain or enlighten. The cellmate was educated. He helped ctiticize Wes’s style and grammar—and he knew a publisher.

Sometimes the field of MacCormick Hines’s reality reversed, and he began to wonder if television weren’t real.

‘My dear,’ he said to the set, ‘I haven’t forgotten what you said that night. The night he died. That you’d give anything to get him back. And believe me, I’m working on just that.’

‘And cleaning the Thermo-K is no problem either,’ she replied. ‘Just push this button, and the blades slip into your dishwater. See how easy?’

Sunday night was Veronica. ‘I’m sorry, Glen, but I don’t think you’re really serious about me as a person. Thanks anyway for showing me those movies.’

Tuesday night was Karen. ‘Glen darling, let’s be reasonable I know your reputation, and I’m just not the kind of girl you want. But thanks all the same. For the champagne and all.’

Wednesday night was Trudy. ‘Oh, Glen, I thought you were different!’

Wendy, on Thursday night, was willing. Even on the tiny monitor screen, Feinwelt could see her face was going expressionless and tuned to receive. Glen bent over her, sucking at a bare shoulder.