The Tomorrow File (8 page)

“Fat chance,” he scoffed. “When they flame me, my nuts are going to be where they’ve always been—between my legs. Who knows, I may go to heaven and need them.”

“Fat chance,” I repeated, and he laughed.

We sat a few moments in silence, staring into the cold fireplace. “Something bothering you?” he said finally.

“Not bothering me, exactly, but perplexing me.”

“What is it?”

“I have a Section conference when I get back. I have to make a recommendation to go ahead on a project or to stop it.”

“What is it?”

Ordinarily, I don’t like to discuss DIVRAD’s business with outsiders. The indepsec stuff I never do, of course. But it suddenly occurred to me that I might benefit from his practical judgment and shrewdness. I briefly explained Project Supersense to him, how film scenes could be synchronized to give Mind-Jerkers increased stimulation. He listened closely, fascinated. He was always fascinated by anything that affected sexual pleasure, however indirectly.

“What do you think?” I asked him when I had finished.

“How many Mind-Jerkers are there in the country?”

“About two million. Maybe seventy-five percent adults.”

“How would they pay for this?”

“I don’t know. We’d license the process, I imagine. The people who make TV tape cassettes might be interested.”

“I doubt it. Two million isn’t much of a potential market these days. Is there any other way of producing the same results? Say by a pill?”

“Not at the moment there isn’t.”

I didn’t tell him about Paul Bumford’s memo in the Tomorrow File on the UP—the Ultimate Pleasure pill.

“Then forget about Project Supersense. Stop it.” He rose and began to pace about the library. “Try for a pill that increases pleasure. Why a pill? The two big C’s of modern merchandising: Convenience and Consumption. You’ve got to have a product that’s convenient to use, and that is consumed by use, and has to be repurchased periodically. The safety razor was the greatest product ever invented. The makers could give it away, because then you had to buy their blades. That’s where the love was. Ditto the camera. What goddamn good is it without film? No, forget about Project Supersense. Strictly a one-time sale. Put your people to work on a pleasure pill.”

“It’s not as simple as you think,” I objected. “First of all, what
is
pleasure? No one can define it. Too subjective. To an obso ef suffering from arthritis, pleasure might simply be absence of pain. To a young em, pleasure might be parachuting from one hundred fifty meters. To me, pleasure is this glass of natural brandy. To you-—well, I know what pleasure is to you.”

“Don’t say it!” He barked his loud laugh.

“What I’m getting at is that there are no objective criteria. How can we possibly start synthesizing a pill? We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

I finished my brandy and stood up. I pleaded tiredness and work to do. He didn’t object. He had work to do, too.

The copter was still on the front lawn, and I supposed the ef pilot was in the guesthouse, waiting.

My parents’ home had been built in 1904 by a wealthy Detroit brewer. I was bom a little after midnight in my mother’s bedroom on the second floor.

The house was a charming horror, a dizziness of gables, turrets, minarets. My father had compounded the insanity by adding a glass-enclosed terrace, a futuristic plastisteel guesthouse, and a boathouse on the river done in Tudor style with beams brought from England. There was an antique coat of arms over the doorway with the motto:
Aut Vincere Aut Mori.
I told my father it meant “I shall conquer death,” and no one ever enlightened him. He was pleased with it, and had
Aut Vincere Aut Mori
engraved on his personal stationery.

My suite was on the third floor. A huge bedroom had a four-poster bed, two enormous armoires that held most of my civilian clothing, chests of drawers, an ornate, gilt-edged pier glass, a few faded prints of sailing ships on the walls. An open doorway (no door) led to a modernized nest. Then there was a small study that was all business: desk, swivel chair, film spindle racks, reading machine, a tape recorder that took cassettes, cartridges, and open-end reels, a TV set, a small refrigerator, and file cabinets.

The final room was my “secret place.” It was always kept locked. I had, as far as I knew, the only key. Each time I left to go back to GPA-1,1 glued a fine thread from jamb to door, about 20 cm above the floor. The thread had never been disturbed.

Two walls of this hideaway were the lower slopes of the mansard roof, interrupted by two gabled windows facing south and east. The inside walls and ceiling were plaster, painted white a long time ago. Now they were almost ocher. There was a frazzled rag rug on the planked floor, a sprung Morris chair with the leather seat and back cushion dried and cracking. There was a metal smoking stand, a bottle of my father’s natural brandy and a single glass, a small bookshelf that held four books.

That’s all there was. Nothing very significant. Except for the four books.

In 1998, most “books” were published on film spindles, designed for lap and desk reading machines. The few actual books printed were paperbound. To buy a hardcover book, you had to patronize a rare book store, an antique shop, or a merchant who sold secondhand junk. Practically everything ever published had been reproduced on microfilm. It took up so much* less space, people simply sold or gave away their actual books, or threw them out. As my father would say, the film spindles were convenient.

In 1992, to escape a sudden and unexpected summer shower, I had ducked into a tiny decrepit antique bookstore on Morse Avenue (formerly Second Avenue in Manhattan). I had passed it a few times previously, and was vaguely aware it specialized in obso art books. How it survived I do not know, since you could buy film spindles of most of the world’s great art, and the color reproduction in a viewing machine was incomparably more vivid than on a printed page.

Waiting for the summer squall to pass, I idly picked up and leafed through a heavily illustrated catalogue of an art exhibit that had been held in New York in 1968. The artist was an em I had never heard of. His name was Egon Schiele.

It would be melodramatic to declare that coming upon that old art exhibition catalogue by accident on a rainy summer afternoon changed my life. It did not change my life, of course. I continued my service in DOB as before (I was then Executive Assistant to AssDepDirRad). I visited my parents, ate, slept, used around; nothing in my life changed.

But something in me was altered. I knew it now. How I was altered by seeing the work of Egon Schiele, in what manner and to what extent, I did not compute then and did not now.

Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter, born in 1890, stopped in 1918. He was twenty-eight. He was the son of a railroad server. He lived in poverty most of his life. He was imprisoned, briefly, for “immorality,” for having shown some of his drawings to curious children. He died of influenza, on the day of his wife’s funeral. She also died of influenza.

Those were the bare bones of the em’s life. They tell you little, and what they do tell is without significance. The meaning lies in the man’s work.

\ If you stared for hours, as I had, at the self-portraits, you would see the depth of demonic possession in that face, and you would-be disturbed, as I was disturbed. Did I like the work of Egon Schiele? I did not. But it obsessed me. There had not been a single day since 1992 when, at some time, awake or asleep, I had not suddenly remembered one of his drawings or paintings. With pain, and the sense of loss.

I had purchased the exhibition catalogue, and the obso shopkeeper promised to try to find more of Schiele’s work. About a month later he mailed me a note—handwritten!—saying he had located another catalogue of a different Schiele exhibition. I bought that one, too. During the following years I was able to buy another book, in poor condition, of sketches Schiele had made while in prison.

Then one day the owner of the shop where I had purchased the catalogue flashed me, in great excitement. He had heard of an obso ef, a widow, a recluse, who owned a biography of Schiele. If was, reportedly, in mint condition, an enormous volume of 687 pages with 228 full-page reproductions (84 in color), plus 612 text illustrations. She would accept no less than 1,000 new dollars for this prize. I bought it immediately, sight unseen. It
was
a prize.

Those were the four books in my secret place: the life and work of Egon Schiele. I had never seen any of his originals (most were in museums in Pan-Europe). I had never been able to locate prints or large reproductions. Schiele’s name was not included on the list of artists whose work was available on film spindles.

On the cover flap of the largest book, an unknown editor had written: “The anguish of the lonely, the . . . despair of the suffering, the desolation of the desperate, are the moods Schiele expressed. . . . The themes are genesis and decay, longing and lust, ecstasy and despair, suffering and sorrow. ...” This was all true, but it was not the entire truth.

I sat in my creaking chair, alone in the world, turning pages to feed on those wonders. Yes, there was gloom there, pain and desperation. But I was once again shocked by the colors, the forms, the beauty he had seen and I had not. There was something indomitable there, something triumphant.

It was after midnight before I closed the book, switched off the light, locked the door, went into my bedroom. Even in bed, my lids resolutely shut, I saw an explosion of color, pinwheels, great rockets and fireworks, all created by that long-stopped em whose eyes stared at me so intently from the self-portraits.

I awoke at 0900 to the roar of the copter ascending: Chester K. Flair commuting to his office and factory near Mt. Clemens. The copter thrummed away, the noise faded. Then I heard gasping caws of delight: water birds over Lake St. Clair. I went to the south window but could not see them in the fog. But I heard their cries.

The break in my daily routine was welcome. I pulled on old slacks, a heavy turtleneck sweater, worn moccasins. In the kitchen, with Miss Catherine bustling about, trying to force a “good, hot, solid breakfast” on me, I had only a glass of orange concentrate in cold Smack and a cup of something called coftea. It tasted like neither. To please Miss Catherine, I ate one slice of toast. Most of it anyway. Every year our bread became fouler and more nutritious.

Then I wandered out onto the grounds. The fog was lifting from the lake. I could still hear the birds. I went down to the shore. I found a flat stone and tried to skip it over the surface of the water, but it sank instantly. I picked up another stone, almost perfectly round. I bounced it on my palm. How could a stone seem so alive?

I strolled about, no plan or destination in mind, just meandering. I passed the garage, the boathouse, the guesthouse, the empty stable. .Once we had a horse, a gentle mare named Eve, with a back as broad as a desk, so fat you couldn’t possibly fall off. Eve had died during the equine encephalitis epizootic in 1985. My mother had wept.

I sat on the cold, wet grass under an oak tree. I rubbed my cheek against the rough bark. I chewed a blade of grass, bitter and pulpy, and spit it out. I poked a finger down into the moist soil.

My mother came down for lunch, sweeping into the glass-inclosed terrace like an obso queen.

“Good morning, chappie! It’s going to be a beautiful day. I just feel it!”

She held up her face to be kissed, then insisted I sit next to her at the table. It was glass-topped, on an ornate wrought-iron base. It was set with linen placemats, Georgian silver, a crystal vase of mums. Everything had been leased. The mums were plastic.

The lunch was delightful, except for the food. My mother was in a manic mood, laughing, shrieking, clutching my arm, telling me outrageous stories of the two young ems who had purchased the estate next to ours. Apparently, both wore false eyelashes, and one had a small gold ring suspended from his nasal septum. Mother was delighted with them; they had brought her natural crocuses they had found on their grounds, in early spring.

“What are their names?” I asked.

“Who, Nick?”

We went on to something else. She was like that now, and deteriorating. Her attention span grew shorter and shorter each time I came home. She would not seek help, and my father would not force her. Nor would I.

Later we strolled about the grounds, trailed by Mrs. McPherson.

The afternoon passed. It was a glory, the air washed, earth scented. We went back to the terrace, and Charles threw open all the windows. Another glass and pitcher were put on a small table next to the soft chair where mother lolled. I lay on the couch. Once we sang a song together, a children’s song I hadn’t heard in years: “If you needed a man to encourage the van. ...”

Then, the pitcher almost empty, she fell silent. Her eyes became dazed: that faraway look I had noticed on greeting her the previous day. I looked around for Mrs. McPherson. She came out of the house and led my mother away.

I went upstairs to bathe, shave, clean my teeth with an old-fashioned brush, and apply makeup. I dressed in a manner I thought would please Millie: a collarless jacket of purple velvet with a lavender shirt and mauve jabot. My knickers were fastened below the knee with gold buckles. My hose were black lace. My shoes were shiny plastisat, with heels higher than I was accustomed to. But I wouldn’t be doing much walking.

A few years previously my father had a brief enthusiasm for antique and classic cars. He had purchased twelve before his interest waned. He sold them all off (by then he was collecting Japanese-armor), and I bought one of them, a 1974 Ford Capri. I kept it in our Grosse Pointe garage. It would have been useless in GPA-1.

I drove the Ford into Detroit, the gift I had brought for Millie on the seat beside me. It was a combination powder and music box, made of plastic, with a tiny ef and em on top who held each other and twirled in time to the music. It was dreadful. Millie would think it a profit.

I had arranged to meet her at a restaurant-cabaret in a crumbling section of the city, down near the river. I had no fear of appearing there in the costume I was wearing. Most of the young factory ems who frequented the place would be dressed in similar fashion, many more elaborately. Last year it had been plastipat tights and Wellington boots.