We Can Build You

‘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.

And so odd that this girl had helped create the almost likable electronic simulacrum, as if on some subconscious level she was aware of the massive deficiency in herself, the emptiness dead center, and was busy compensating for it …

The next morning Maury and I had breakfast down the street from the MASA building at a little cafe. As we faced each other across the booth I said,

‘Listen, how sick is your daughter right now? If she’s still a ward of the mental health people she must still be –’

‘A condition like hers can’t be cured,’ Maury said, sipping his orange juice,‘it’s a life-long process that either moves into less or into more difficult stages.’

‘Would she still be classified under the McHeston Act as a ’phrenic if they were to administer the Benjamin Proverb Test at this moment to her?’

Maury said, ‘It wouldn’t be the Benjamin Proverb Test; they’d use the Soviet test, that Vigotsky-Luria colored blocks test, on her at this point. You just don’t realize how early she branched off from the norm, if you could be said to be part of the “norm”.’