We Can Build You (10 page)

Presently I noticed a sign in the window; professionally lettered, it explained to the crowd what was going on.

The corny phrasing gave it away as Maury’s work. Infuriated, I pushed through the crowd and rattled the showroom door; it was locked, but having a key I unlocked it and passed on inside.

There in the corner on a newly-purchased couch sat Maury, Bob Bundy and my father. They were quietly watching the Lincoln.

“Hi, buddy boy,” Maury said to me.

“Made your cost back yet?” I asked him.

“No. We’re not charging anybody for anything. We’re just demonstrating.”

“You dreamed up that sixth-grader type sign, didn’t you? I know you did. What sort of sidewalk traffic did you expect to make an inquiry? Why don’t you have the thing sell cans of auto wax or dishwasher soap? Why just have it sit and write? Or is it entering some breakfast-food contest?”

Maury said, “It’s going over its regular correspondence.” He and my dad and Bundy all seemed sobered.

“Where’s your daughter?”

“She’ll be back.”

To my dad I said, “You mind it using your desk?”

“No, mein Kind,” he answered. “Go speak with it; it maintains a calmness when interrupted that astonishes me. This I could well learn.”

I had never seen my father so chastened.

“Okay,” I said, and walked over to the rolltop desk and the writing figure. Outside the showroom window the crowd gawked.

“Mr. President,” I murmured. My throat felt dry. “Sir, I hate to bother you.” I felt nervous, and yet at the same time I knew perfectly well that this was a machine I was facing. My going up to it and speaking to it this way put me into the fiction, the drama, as an actor like the machine itself; nobody had fed me an instruction tape—they didn’t have to. I was acting out my part of the foolishness voluntarily. And yet I couldn’t help myself. Why not say to it, “Mr. Simulacrum”? After all that was the truth.

The truth! What did that mean? Like a kid going up to the department store Santa; to know the truth was to drop dead. Did I want to do that? In a situation like this, to face the truth would mean the end of everything, of me before all. The simulacrum wouldn’t have suffered. Maury, Bob Bundy and my dad wouldn’t even have noticed. So I went on, because it was myself I was protecting; and I knew it, better than anyone else in the room, including the crowd outside gawking in.

Glancing up, the Lincoln put aside its quill pen and said in a rather high-pitched, pleasant voice, “Good afternoon. I take it you are Mr. Louis Rosen.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

And then the room blew up in my face. The rolltop desk flew into a million pieces; they burst up at me, flying slowly, and I shut my eyes and fell forward, flat on the floor; I did not even put out my hands. I felt it hit me; I smashed into bits against it, and darkness covered me up.

I had fainted. It was too much for me. I had passed out cold.

Next I knew I was upstairs in the office, propped up in a corner. Maury Rock sat beside me, smoking one of his Corina Larks, glaring at me and holding a bottle of household ammonia under my nose.

“Christ,” he said, when he realized I had come to. “You got a bump on your forehead and a split lip.”

I put up my hand and felt the bump; it seemed to be as big as a lemon. And I could taste the shreds of my lip. “I passed out,” I said.

“Yeah, didn’t you.”

Now I saw my dad hovering nearby. And—disagreeably—Pris Frauenzimmer in her long gray cloth coat, pacing back and forth, glancing at me with exasperation and the faint hint of contemptuous amusement.

“One word from it,” she said to me, “and you’re out. Good grief.”

“So what,” I managed to say feebly.

To his daughter, Maury said, grinning, “It proves what I said; it’s effective.”

“What—did the Lincoln do?” I asked. “When I passed out?”

Maury said, “It got up, picked you up and carried you up here.”

“Jesus,” I murmured.

“Why did you faint?” Pris said, bending down to peer at me intently. “What a bump. You idiot. Anyhow, it got the crowd; you should have heard them. I was outside with them, trying to get through. You’d think we had produced God or something; they were actually praying and a couple of old ladies were crossing themselves. And some of them, if you can believe it—”

“Okay,” I broke in.

“Let me finish.”

“No,” I said. “Shut up. Okay?”

We glared at each other and then Pris rose to her feet. “Did you know your lip is badly gashed? You getter get a couple of stiches put in it.”

Touching my lip with my fingers I discovered that it was still dribbling blood. Perhaps she was right.

“I’ll drive you to a doctor,” Pris said. She walked to the door and stood waiting. “Come on, Louis.”

“I don’t need any stitches,” I said, but I rose and shakily followed after her.

As we waited in the hall for the elevator Pris said, “You’re not very brave, are you?”

I did not answer.

“You reacted worse than I did, worse than any of us. I’m surprised. There must be a far less stable streak in you than any of us knows about. And I bet someday, under stress, it shows up. Someday you’re going to reveal grave psychological problems.”

The elevator door opened; we entered and the doors shut.

“Is it so bad to react?” I said.

“At Kansas City I learned how not to react unless it was in my interest to. That was what saved me and got me out of there and out of my illness. That was what they did for me. It’s always a bad sign when there’s effect, as in your case; it’s always a sign of failure in adjustment. They call it parataxis, at Kansas City; it’s emotionality that enters interpersonal relations and makes them complicated. It doesn’t matter if it’s hate or envy or, as in your case, fear—they’re all parataxis. And when they get strong enough you have mental illness. And, when they take control, you have ‘phrenia, like I had. That’s the worst.”

I held a handkerchief to my lip, dabbing and fussing with the cut. There was no way I could explain my reaction to Pris; I did not try.

“Shall I kiss it?” Pris said. “And make it well?”

I glared at her, but then I saw that on her face there was vibrant concern.

“Hell,” I said, flustered. “It’ll be okay.” I was embarrassed and I couldn’t look at her. I felt like a little boy again. “Adults don’t talk to each other like that,” I mumbled. “Kissing and making well—what sort of dumb diction is that?”

“I want to help you.” Her mouth quivered. “Oh, Louis—it’s all over.”

“What’s all over?”

“It’s alive. I can never touch it again. Now what’ll I do? I have no further purpose in life.”

“Christ,” I said.

“My life is empty—I might as well be dead. All I’ve done and thought has been the Lincoln.” The elevator door opened and Pris started out into the lobby of the building. I followed. “Do you care what doctor you go to? I’ll just take you down the street, I guess.”

“Fine.”

As we got into the white Jaguar, Pris said, “Tell me what to do, Louis. I have to do something right away.”

At a loss I said, “You’ll get over this depression.”

“I never felt like this before.”

“I’m thinking. Maybe you could run for Pope.” It was the first thing that popped into my minid; it was inane.

“I wish I were a man. Women are cut off from so much. You could be anything, Louis. What can a woman be? A housewife or a clerk or a typist or a teacher.”

“Be a doctor,” I said. “Stitch up wounded lips.”

“I can’t stand sick or damaged or defective creatures. You know that, Louis. That’s why I’m taking you to the doctor; I have to avert my gaze—maimed as you are.”

“I’m not maimed! I’ve just got a cut lip!”

Pris started up the car and we drove out into traffic. “I’m going to forget the Lincoln. I’ll never think of it again as living; it’s just an object to me from this minute on. Something to market.”

I nodded.

“I’m going to see to it that Sam Barrows buys it. I have no other task in life but that. From now on all I will think or do will have Sam Barrows at the core of it.”

If I felt like laughing at what she was saying I had only to look at her face; her expression was so bleak, so devoid of happiness or joy or even humor, that I could only nod. While driving me to the doctor to have my lip stitched up, Pris had dedicated her entire life, her future and everything in it. It
was a kind of maniacal whim, and I could see that it had swum up to the surface out of desperation. Pris could not bear to spend a single moment without something to occupy her; she had to have a goal. It was her way of forcing the universe to make sense.

“Pris,” I said, “the difficulty with you is that you’re rational.”

“I’m not; everybody says I do exactly what I feel like.”

“You’re driven by iron-clad logic. It’s terrible. It has to be gotten rid of. Tell Horstowski that; tell him to free you from logic. You function as if a geometric proof were cranking the handle of your life. Relent, Pris. Be carefree and foolish and stupid. Do something that has no purpose. Okay? Don’t even take me to the doctor; instead, dump me off in front of a shoeshine parlor and I’ll get my shoes shined.”

“Your shoes are already shined.”

“See? See how you have to be logical all the time? Stop the car at the next intersection and we’ll both get out and leave it, or go to a flower shop and buy flowers and throw them at other motorists.”

“Who’ll pay for the flowers?”

“We’ll steal them. We’ll run out the door without paying.”

“Let me think it over,” Pris said.

“Don’t think! Did you ever steal anything when you were a kid? Or bust something just for the hell of it, maybe some public property like a street lamp?”

“I once stole a candy bar from a drugstore.”

“We’ll do that now,” I said. “We’ll find a drugstore and we’ll be kids again; we’ll steal a dime candy bar apiece, and we’ll go find a shady place and sit like on a lawn for instance and eat it.”

“You can’t, because of your lip.”

I said in a reasonable, urgent voice, “Okay. I admit that. But you could. Isn’t that so? Admit it. You could go into a drugstore right now and do that, even without me.”

“Would you come along anyhow?”

“If you want me to. Or I could park at the curb with the motor running and drive you the second you appeared. So you’d get away.”

“No,” Pris said, “I want you to come into the store with me and be right there beside me. You could show me which candy bar to take; I need your help.”

“I’ll do it.”

“What’s the penalty for something like that?”

“Life everlasting,” I said.

“You’re kidding me.”

“No,” I said. “I mean it.” And I did; I was deeply serious.

“Are you making fun of me? I see you are. Why would you do that? Am I ridiculous, is that it?”

“God no!”

But she had made up her mind. “You know I’ll believe anything. They always kidded me in school about my gullibility. ‘Gullible’s travels,’ they called me.”

I said, “Come into the drugstore, Pris, and I’ll show you; let me prove it to you. To save you.”

“Save me from what?”

“From the certitude of your own mind.”

She wavered; I saw her swallow, struggle with herself, try to see what she should do and if she had made a mistake—she turned and said to me earnestly, “Louis, I believe you about the drugstore. I know you wouldn’t make fun of me; you might hate me—you do hate me, on many levels—but you’re not the kind of person who enjoys taunting the weak.”

“You’re not weak.”

“I am. But you have no instinct to sense it. That’s good, Louis. I’m the other way around; I have that instinct and I’m not good.”

“Good, schmood,” I said loudly. “Stop all this, Pris. You’re depressed because you’ve finished your creative work with the Lincoln, you’re temporarily at loose ends and like a lot of creative people you suffer a letdown between one—”

“There’s the doctor’s place,” Pris said, slowing the car.

After the doctor had examined me—and sent me off without seeing the need of stitching me up—I was able to persuade Pris to stop at a bar. I felt I had to have a drink. I explained to her that it was a method of celebrating, that it was something which had to be done; it was expected of us. We had seen the Lincoln come to life and it was a great moment, perhaps the greatest moment, of our lives. And yet, as great as it was, there was in it something ominous and sad, something upsetting to all of us, that was just too much for us to handle.

“I’ll have just one beer,” Pris said as we crossed the sidewalk.

At the bar I ordered a beer for her and an Irish coffee for myself.

“I can see you’re at home, here,” Pris said, “in a place like this. You spend a lot of time bumming around bars, don’t you?”

I said, ‘There’s something I’ve been thinking about you that I have to ask you. Do you believe the cutting observations you make about other people? Or are they just off-hand, for the purpose of making people feel bad? And if so—”

“What do you think?” Pris said in a level voice.

“I don’t know.”

“Why do you care anyhow?”

“I’m insatiably curious about you, for every detail and tittle.”

“Why?”

“You’ve had a fascinating history. Schizoid by ten, compulsive-obsessive neurotic by thirteen, full-blown schizophrenic by seventeen and a ward of the Federal Government, now halfway cured and back among human beings again but still—” I broke off. That was not the reason, her lurid history. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m in love with you.”

“You’re lying.”

Amending my statement I said, “I
could
be in love with you.”