We Can Build You

3

Still hoping my father would be won over, Maury left the Stanton – on consignment, so to speak – and we drove back to Ontario. By then it was nearly midnight, and since we both were depressed by my father’s weariness and lack of enthusiasm Maury invited me to stay overnight at his house. I was glad to accept; I felt the need of company.

When we arrived we found his daughter Pris, who I had assumed was still back at Kasanin Clinic at Kansas City in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Mental Health. Pris, as I knew from what Maury had told me, had been a ward of the Federal Government since her third year in high school; tests administered routinely in the public schools had picked up her ‘dynamism of difficulty,’ as the psychiatrists are calling it now – in the popular vernacular, her schizophrenic condition.

‘She’ll cheer you up,’ Maury said, when I hung back. ‘That’s what you and I both need. She’s grown a lot since you saw her last; she’s no child anymore. Come on.’ He dragged me into the house by one arm.

She was seated on the floor in the living room wearing pink pedal pushers. Her hair was cut short and in the years since I had seen her she had lost weight. Spread around her lay colored tile; she was in the process of cracking the tile into irregular pits with a huge pair of long-handled cutting pliers.

‘Come look at the bathroom,’ she said, hopping up. I followed warily after her.

On the bathroom walls she had sketched all sorts of sea monsters and fish, even a mermaid; she had already partially tiled them with every color imaginable. The mermaid had red tiles for tits, one bright tile in the center of each breast.

The panorama both repelled and interested me.

‘Why not have little light bulbs for nipples?’ I said. ‘When someone comes in to use the can and turns on the light the nipples light up and guide him on his way.’

No doubt she had gotten into this tiling orgy due to years of occupational therapy at Kansas City; the mental health people were keen on anything creative. The Government has literally tens of thousands of patients in their several clinics throughout the country, all busy weaving or painting or dancing or making jewelry or binding books or sewing costumes for plays. And all the patients are there involuntarily, committed by law. Like Pris, many of them had been picked up during puberty, which is the time psychosis tends to strike.

Undoubtedly Pris was much better now, or they would not have released her into the outer world. But she still did not look normal or natural to me. As we walked back to the living room together I took a close look at her; I saw a little hard, heart-shaped face, with a widow’s crown, black hair, and due to her odd make-up, eyes outlined in black, a Harlequin effect, and almost purple lipstick; the whole color scheme made her appear unreal and doll-like, lost somewhere back behind the mask which she had created out of her face. And the skinniness of her body put the capper on the effect: she looked to me like a dance of death creation animated in some weird way, probably not through the usual assimilation of solid and liquid foods … perhaps she chewed only walnut shells. But anyhow, from one standpoint she looked good, although unusual to say the least. For my money, however, she looked less normal than the Stanton.

‘Sweet Apple,’ Maury said to her, ‘we left the Edwin M. Stanton over at Louis’ dad’s house.’

Glancing up, she said, ‘Is it off?’ Her eyes burned with a wild, intense flame, which both startled and impressed me.

‘Pris,’ I said, ‘the mental health people broke the mold when they produced you. What an eerie yet fine-looking chick you turned out to be, now that you’ve grown up and gotten out of there.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, with no feeling at all; her tone had, in former times, been totally flat, no matter what the situation, including big crises. And that was the way with her still.

‘Get the bed ready,’ I said to Maury, ‘so I can turn in.’

Together, he and I unfolded the guest bed in the spare room; we tossed sheets and blankets on it, and a pillow. His daughter made no move to help; she remained in the living room snipping tile.

‘How long’s she been working on that bathroom mural?’ I asked.

‘Since she got back from K.C. Which has been quite a while, now. For the first couple of weeks she had to report back to the mental health people in this area. She’s not actually out; she’s on probation and receiving outpatient therapy. In fact you could say she’s on loan to the outside world.’

‘Is she better or worse?’

‘A lot better. I never told you how bad she got, there in high school before they picked it up on their test. We didn’t know what was wrong. Frankly, I thank God for the McHeston Act; if they hadn’t picked it up, if she had gone on getting sicker, she’d be either a total schizophrenic paranoid or a dilapidated hebephrenic, by now. Permanently institutionalized for sure.’

I said, ‘She looks so strange.’

‘What do you think of the tiling?’

‘It won’t increase the value of the house.’

Maury bristled. ‘Sure it will.’

Appearing at the door of the spare room, Pris said, ‘I asked, is it off?’She glowered at us as if she had guessed we were discussing her.

‘Yes,’ Maury said, ‘unless Jerome turned it back on to discourse about Spinoza with it.’

‘What’s it know?’ I asked. ‘Has it got a lot of spare random useless type facts in it? Because if not my dad won’t be interested long.’

Pris said, ‘It has the same facts that the original Edwin M. Stanton had. We researched his life to the nth degree.’

I got the two of them out of my bedroom, then took off my clothes and went to bed. Presently I heard Maury say goodnight to his daughter and go off to his own bedroom. And then I heard nothing – except, as I had expected, the snap-snap of tile being cut.

For an hour I lay in bed trying to sleep, falling off and then being brought back by the noise. At last I got up, turned on my light, put my clothes back on, smoothed my hair in place, rubbed my eyes, and came out of the spare room. She sat exactly as I had seen her first that evening, yogi-style, now with an enormous heap of broken tile around her.

‘I can’t sleep with that racket,’ I told her.

‘Too bad.’ She did not even glance up.

‘I’m a guest.’

‘Go elsewhere.’

‘I know what using that pliers symbolizes,’ I told her. ‘Emasculating thousands upon thousands of males, one after another. Is that why you left Kasanin Clinic? To sit here all night doing this?’

‘No. I’m getting a job.’

‘Doing what? The labor market’s glutted.’

‘I have no fears. There’s no one like me in the world. I’ve already received an offer from a company that handles emigration processing. There’s an enormous amount of statistical work involved.’

‘So it’s someone like you,’ I said, ‘who’ll decide which of us can leave Earth.’

‘I turned it down. I don’t intend to be just another bureaucrat. Have you ever heard of Sam K. Barrows?’

‘Naw,’ I said. But the name did sound familiar.

‘There was an article on him in Look. When he was twenty he always rose at five A.M., had a bowl of stewed prunes, ran two miles around the streets of Seattle, then returned to his room to shave and take a cold shower. And then he went off and studied his law books.’

‘Then he’s a lawyer.’

‘Not anymore,’ Pris said. ‘Look over in the bookcase. The copy of Look is there.’

‘Why should I care?’ I said, but I went to get the magazine.

Sure enough, there on the cover in color was a man labeled:

SAM K. BARROWS, AMERICA’S MOST ENTERPRISING NEW YOUNG MULTI-MILLIONAIRE.

It was dated June 18, 1981, so it was fairly recent. And sure enough, there came Sam, jogging up one of the waterfront streets of downtown Seattle, in khaki shorts and gray sweatshirt, at what appeared to be sunup, puffing happily, a man with head shining due to being smooth-shaven, his eyes like the dots stuck in a snowman’s face: expressionless, tiny. No emotion there; only the lower half of the face seemed to be grinning.

‘If you saw him on TV ’Pris said.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I saw him on TV.’ I remembered now, because at the time – a year ago – the man had struck me unfavorably. His monotonous way of speaking … he had leaned close to the reporter and mumbled at him very rapidly. ‘Why do you want to work for him?’ I asked.

‘Sam Barrows,’ Pris said, ‘is the greatest living land speculator in existence. Think about that.’

‘That’s probably because we’re running out of land,’ I said. ‘All the realtors are going broke because there’s nothing to sell. Just people and no places to put them.’ And then I remembered.

Barrows had solved the real estate speculation problem. In a series of far-reaching legal actions, he had managed to get the United States Government to permit private speculation in land on the other planets. Sam Barrows had single-handedly opened the way for sub-dividers on Luna, Mars and Venus. His name would go down in history forever.

‘So that’s the man you want to work for,’ I said. ‘The man who polluted the untouched other worlds.’ His salesmen sold from offices all over the United States his glowingly-described Lunar lots.

‘“Polluted untouched other worlds,’” Pris mimicked. A slogan of those conservationists.’

But true,’ I said. ‘Listen, how are you going to make use of your land, once you’ve bought it? How do you live on it? No water, no air, no heat, no –’

‘That will be provided,’ Pris said.

‘How?’

‘That’s what makes Barrows the great man he is,’ Pris said. ‘His vision. Barrows Enterprises is working day and night –’

‘A racket,’ I broke in.

There was silence, then. A strained silence.

‘Have you ever actually spoken to Barrows?’ I asked, ‘It’s one thing to have a hero; you’re a young girl and it’s natural for you to worship a guy who’s on the cover of magazines and on TV and he’s rich and single-handedly he opened up the Moon to loan sharks and land speculators. But you were talking about getting a job.’

Pris said, ‘I applied for a job at one of his companies. And I told them I wanted to see him personally.’

‘They laughed.’

‘No, they sent me into his office. He sat there and listened to me for a whole minute. Then, of course, he had to take care of other business; they sent me on to the personnel manager’s office.’

‘What did you say to him in your minute?’

‘I looked at him. He looked at me. You’ve never seen him in real life. He’s incredibly handsome.’

‘On television,’ I said, ‘he’s a lizard.’

‘I told him that I can screen dead beats. No time-wasters could get past me if I was his secretary. I know how to be tough and yet also I never turn away anyone who matters. You see, I can turn it on and off. Do you comprehend?’

‘But can you open letters?’ I said.

‘They have machines who do that.’

‘Your father does that. That’s Maury’s job with us.’

‘And that’s why I’d never work for you,’ Pris said. ‘Because you’re so pathetically small. You hardly exist. No, I can’t open letters. I can’t do any routine jobs. I’ll tell you what I can do. It was my idea to build the Edwin M. Stanton simulacrum.’

I felt a deep unease.

‘Maury wouldn’t have thought of it,’ Pris said. ‘Bundy – he’s a genius. He’s inspired. But it’s idiot savantry that he has; the rest of his brain is totally deteriorated by the hebephrenic process. I designed the Stanton and he built it, and it’s a success; you saw it. I don’t even want or need the credit; it was fun. Like this.’ She had resumed her tile-snipping. ‘Creative work,’ she said.

‘What did Maury do? Tie its shoelaces?’

‘Maury was the organizer. He saw to it that we had our supplies.’

I had the dreadful feeling that this calm account was god’s truth. Naturally, I could check with Maury. And yet – it did not seem to me that this girl even knew how to lie; she was almost the opposite from her father. Perhaps she took after her mother, whom I had never met. They had been divorced, a broken family, long before I met Maury and became his partner.

‘How’s your out-patient psychoanalysis coming?’ I asked her.

‘Fine. How’s yours?’

‘I don’t need it,’ I said.

‘That’s where you’re wrong. You’re very sick, just like me.” She smiled up at me. ‘Face facts.’

‘Would you stop that snap-snapping? So I can go to sleep?’

‘No,’ she answered. ‘I want to finish the octopus tonight.’

‘If I don’t get sleep,’ I said. ‘I’ll drop dead.’

‘So what?’

‘Please,’ I said.

‘Another two hours,’ Pris said.

Are they all like you?’ I asked her. ‘The people who emerge from the Federal clinics? The new young people who get steered back onto course? No wonder we’re having trouble selling organs.’

‘What sort of organs?’ Pris said. ‘Personally I’ve got all the organs I want.’

‘Ours are electronic.’

Mine aren’t. Mine are flesh and blood.’

‘So what,’ I said. ‘Better they were electronic and you went to bed and let your houseguest sleep.’

‘You’re no guest of mine. Just my father’s. And don’t talk to me about going to bed or I’ll wreck your life. I’ll tell my father you propositioned me, and that’ll end MASA ASSOCIATES and your career, and then you’ll wish you never saw an organ of any kind, electronic or not. So toddle on to bed, buddy, and be glad you don’t have worse troubles than not being able to sleep.’ And she resumed her snap-snapping.

I stood for a moment, wondering what to do. Finally I turned and went back into the spare room, without having found any rejoinder.

My god, I thought. Beside her, the Stanton contraption is all warmth and friendliness.

And yet, she had no hostility toward me. She had no sense that she had said anything cruel or hard – she simply went on with her work. Nothing had happened, from her standpoint. I didn’t matter to her.

If she had really disliked me – but could she do that? Did such a word mean anything in connection with her? Maybe it would be better, I thought as I locked my bedroom door. It would mean something more human, more comprehensible, to be disliked by her. But to be brushed off purposelessly, just so she would not be interfered with, so she could go on and finish her work – as if I were a variety of restraint, of possible interference and nothing more.

She must see only the most meager outer part of people, I decided. Must be aware of them in terms only of their coercive or non-coercive effects on her … thinking that, I lay with one ear pressed against the pillow, my arm over the other, dulling the snap-snapping noise, the endless procession of cuttings-off that passed one by one into infinity.

I could see why she felt attracted to Sam K. Barrows. Birds of a feather, or rather lizards of a scale. On the TV show, and again now, looking at the magazine cover… it was as if the brain part of Barrows, the shaved dome of his skull, had been lopped off and then skillfully replaced with some servo-system or some feedback circuit of selenoids and relays, all of which was operated from a distance off. Or operated by Something which sat upstairs there at the controls, pawing at the switches with tiny tricky convulsive motions.