We Can Build You

  “He’s right,” Pris said. “We ought to get the Edwin M. Stanton back. He’d be of use to us; he’s so inflexible.”

  “We need iron,” I agreed. “Backbone. We’re bending too much.”

  “Well, we can get it back,” Maury said. “Tonight even. We can charter a private plane, fly to the Sea-Tac Airfield outside Seattle, drive into Seattle and search until we find it and then come back here. Have it tomorrow morning when we confront Barrows.”

  “But we’d be dead on our feet,” I pointed out, “at best. And it might take us days to find it. It may not even be in Seattle, by now; it may have flown on to Alaska or to Japan—even taken off for one of Barrows’ subdivisions on the Moon.”

  We sipped our Dixie cups of bourbon morosely, all but the Lincoln; it had put its aside.

  “Have you ever had any kangaroo tail soup?” Maury said.

  We all looked at him, including the simulacrum.

  “I have a can around here somewhere,” Maury said. “We can heat it up on the hotplate; it’s terrific. I’ll make it.”

  “Let me out,” I said.

  “No thanks,” Pris said.

  The simulacrum smiled its gentle, wan smile.

  “I’ll tell you how I happened to get it,” Maury said. “I was in the supermarket, in Boise, waiting in line. The checker was saying to some guy, ‘No, we’re not going to stock any kangaroo tail soup anymore.’ All of a sudden from the other side of the display—it was boxes of cereal or something—this hollow voice issues: ‘No more kangaroo tail soup? Ever?’ And this guy comes hurrying around with his cart to buy up the last cans. So I got a couple. Try it, it’ll make you all feel better.”

  I said, “Notice how Barrows worked us down. He calls the simulacra automatons first and then he calls them gimmicks and then he winds up calling them dolls.”

  “It’s a technique,” Pris said, “a sales technique. He’s cutting the ground out from under us.”

  “Words,” the simulacrum said, “are weapons.”

  “Can’t you say anything to him?” I asked the simulacrum. “All you did was debate with him.”

  The simulacrum shook its head no.

  “Of course it can’t do anything,” Pris said. “Because it argues fair, like we did in school. That’s the way they debated back in the middle of the last century. Barrows doesn’t argue fair, and there’s no audience to catch him. Right, Mr. Lincoln?”

  The simulacrum did not respond, but its smile seemed—to me—to become even sadder, and its face longer and more lined with care.

  “Things are worse now than they used to be,” Maury said.

  But, I thought, we still have to do something. “He may have the Stanton under lock and key, for all we know. He may have it torn down on a bench somewhere, and his engineers are making one of their own slightly redesigned so as not to infringe on our patents.” I turned to Maury. “Do we actually have patents?”

  ‘Tending,” Maury said. “You know how it works.” He did not sound encouraging. “I don’t doubt he can steal what we have, now that he’s seen our idea. It’s the kind of thing that if you know it can be done, you can do it yourself, given enough time.”

  “Okay,” I said, “so it’s like the internal combustion engine. But we’ve got a headstart; let’s start manufacturing them at the Rosen factory as soon as possible. Let’s get ours on the market before Barrows does.”

  They all looked at me wide-eyed.

  “I think you’ve got something there,” Maury said, chewing his thumb. “What else can we do anyhow? You think your dad could get the assembly line going right away? Is he pretty fast on converting over, like this?”

  “Fast as a snake,” I said.

  Pris said derisively, “Don’t put us on. Old Jerome? It’ll be a year before he can make dies to stamp the parts out with, and the wiring’ll have to be done in Japan—he’ll have to fly to Japan to arrange for that, and he’ll want to take a boat, like before.”

  “Oh,” I said, “you’ve thought about it, I see.”

  “Sure,” Pris said sneeringly. “I actually considered it seriously.”

  “In any case,” I said, “it’s our only hope; we’ve got to get the goddam things on the retail market—we’ve wasted enough time as it is.”

  “Agreed,” Maury said. “What we’ll do is, tomorrow we’ll go to Boise and commission old Jerome and your funny brother Chester to start work. Start making die stampers and flying to Japan—but what’ll we tell Barrows?”

  That stumped us. Again we were all silent.

  “We’ll tell him,” I announced, “that the Lincoln busted. That it broke down and we’ve withdrawn it from market. And then he won’t want the thing so he’ll go back home to Seattle.”

  Maury, coming over beside me, said in a low voice, “You mean cut the switch on it. Shut it off.”

  I nodded.

  “I hate to do that,” Maury said. We both glanced at the Lincoln, which was regarding us with melancholy eyes.

  “He’ll insist on seeing it for himself,” Pris pointed out. “Let him back on it a couple of times, if he wants to. Let him shake it like a gum machine; if we have to cut it off it won’t do a thing.”

  “Okay,” Maury agreed.

  “Good,” I said. “Then we’ve decided.”

  We shut off the Lincoln then and there. Maury, as soon as the deed was done, went downstairs and out to his car and drove home, saying he was going to bed. Pris offered to drive me to my motel in my Chewy, taking it home herself and picking me up the next morning. I was so tired that I accepted her offer.

  As she drove me through closed-up Ontario she said, “I wonder if all wealthy, powerful men are like that.”

  “Sure. All those who made their own money—not the ones who inherit it, maybe.”

  “It was dreadful,” Pris said. “Shutting the Lincoln off. To see it—stop living, as if we had killed it again. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  Later, when she drew up before my motel, she said, “Do you think that’s the only way to make a lot of money? To be like him?” Sam K. Barrows had changed her; no doubt of that. She was a sobered young woman.

  I said, “Don’t ask me. I draw seven-fifty a month, at best.”

  “But one has to admire him.”

  “I knew you’d say that, sooner or later. As soon as you said but I knew what was going to follow.”

  Pris sighed, “So I’m an open book to you.”

  “No, you’re the greatest enigma I’ve ever run up against. It’s just in this one case I said to myself, Tris is going to say but one has to admire him’ and you did say it.”

  “And I’ll bet you also believe I’ll gradually go back to the way I used to feel until I leave off the ‘but’ and just admire him, period.”

  I said nothing. But it was so.

  “Did you notice,” Pris said, “that I was able to endure the shutting down of the Lincoln? If I can stand that I can stand anything. I even enjoyed it although I didn’t let it show, of course.”

  “You’re lying to beat hell.”

  “I got a very enjoyable sense of power, an ultimate power. We gave it life and then we took the life right back—snap! As easy as that. But the moral burden doesn’t rest on us anyhow; it rests on Sam Barrows, and he wouldn’t have had a twinge, he would have gotten a big kick out of it. Look at the strength there, Louis. We really wish we were the same way. I don’t regret turning it off. I regret being emotionally upset. I disgust myself for being what I am. No wonder I’m down here with the rest of you and Sam Barrows is up at the top. You can see the difference between him and us; it’s so clear.”

  She was quiet for a time, lighting a cigarette and sitting with it.

  “What about sex?” she said presently.

  “Sex is worse yet, even than turning off nice simulacra.”

  “I mean sex changes you. The experience of intercourse.”

  It froze my blood, to hear her talk like that.

  “Wha
t’s wrong?” she said.

  “You scare me.”

  “Why?”

  “You talk as if—”

  Pris finished for me, “As if I was up there looking down even on my own body. I am. It’s not me. I’m a soul.”

  “Like Blunk said, ‘Show me.’”

  “I can’t, Louis, but it’s still true, I’m not a physical body in time and space. Plato was right.”

  “What about the rest of us?”

  “Well, that’s your business. I perceive you as bodies, so maybe you are; maybe that’s all you are. Don’t you know?

  If you don’t know I can’t tell you.” She put out her cigarette. “I better go home, Louis.”

  “Okay,” I said, opening the car door. The motel, with all its rooms, was dark; even the big neon sign had been shut off for the night. The middle-aged couple who ran the place were no doubt tucked safely in their beds.

  Pris said, “Louis, I carry a diaphragm around in my purse.”

  ‘The kind you put inside you? Or the kind that’s in the chest and you breathe in and out by.”

  “Don’t kid. This is very serious for me, Louis. Sex, I mean.”

  I said, “Well, then give me funny sex.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Nothing. Just nothing.” I started to shut the car door after me.

  “I’m going to say something corny,” Pris said, rolling down the window on my side.

  “No you’re not, because I’m not going to listen. I hate corny statements by deadly serious people. Better you should stay a remote soul that sneers at suffering animals; at least—” I hesitated. But what the hell. “At least I can honestly soberly hate you and fear you.”

  “How will you feel after you hear the corny statement?”

  I said, “I’ll make an appointment with the hospital tomorrow and have myself castrated or whatever they call it.”

  “You mean,” she said slowly, “that I’m sexually desirable when I’m cruel and schizoid, but if I become MAUDLIN, THEN I’m not even that.”

  “Don’t say ‘even.’ That’s a hell of a lot.”

  “Take me into your motel room,” Pris said, “and screw me.”

  “There is, somehow, in your language, something, which I can’t put my finger on, that somehow leaves something to be desired.”

  “You’re just chicken.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “No, and I’m not going to prove it by doing so. I really am not chicken; I’ve slept with all sorts of women in my time. Honest. There isn’t a thing about sex that could scare me; I’m too old. You’re talking about college-boy stuff, first box of contraceptives stuff.”

  “But you still won’t screw me.”

  “No,” I agreed, “because you’re not only detached, you’re brutal. And not with just me but with yourself, with the physical body you despise and claim isn’t you. Don’t you remember that discussion between Lincoln—the Lincoln simulacrum, I mean—and Barrows and Blunk? An animal is close to being man and both are made out of flesh and blood. That’s what you’re trying not to be.”

  “Not trying—am not.”

  “What does that make you? A machine.”

  “But a machine has wires. I have no wires.”

  “Then what?” I said. “What do you think you are?”

  Pris said, “I know what I am. The schizoid is very common in this century, like hysteria was in the nineteenth. It’s a form of deep, pervasive, subtle psychic alienation. I wish I wasn’t, but I am … you’re lucky, Louis Rosen; you’re old-fashioned. I’d trade with you. I’m worried that my language regarding sex is crude. I scared you off with it. I’m very sorry about that.”

  “Not crude. Worse. Inhuman. You’d—I know what you’d do. If you had intercourse with someone—if you’ve had.” I felt confused and tired. “You’d observe, the whole goddam time; mentally, spiritually, in every way. Always be conscious.”

  “Is that wrong? I thought everyone did.”

  “Goodnight.” I started away from the car.

  “Goodnight, coward.”

  “Up yours,” I said.

  “Oh, Louis,” she said, with a shiver of anguish.

  “Forgive me,” I said.

  Sniffling, she said, “What an awful thing to say.”

  “For Christ’s sake, forgive me,” I said, “you have to forgive me. I’m the sick one, for saying that to you; it’s like something took hold of my tongue.”

  Still sniffling, she nodded mutely. She started up the motor of the car and turned its lights on.

  “Don’t go,” I said. “Listen, you can chalk it up to a demented subrational attempt on my part to reach you, don’t you see? All your talk, your making yourself admire Sam Barrows even more than ever, that drove me out of my mind. I’m very fond of you, I really am; seeing you open up for a minute to a warm, human view, and then going back—”

  “Thanks,” she said in a near whisper, “for trying to make me feel better.” She shot me a tiny smile.

  “Don’t let this make you worse,” I said, holding onto the door of the car, afraid she would leave.

  “It won’t. In fact it barely touched me.”

  “Come on inside,” I said. “Sit for a moment, okay?”

  “No. Don’t worry—it’s just the strain on us all. I know it upset you. The reason I use such crude words is that I don’t know any better, nobody taught me how to talk about the unspeakable things.”

  “It just takes experience. But listen, Pris, promise me something, promise me you won’t deny to yourself that I hurt you. It’s good to be able to feel what you felt just now, good to—”

  “Good to be hurt.”

  “No, I don’t mean that; I mean it’s encouraging. I’m not trying merely to make up for what I did. Look, Pris, the fact that you suffered so acutely just now because of what I—”

  “The hell I did.”

  “You did,” I said. “Don’t lie.”

  “All right, Louis, I did; I won’t lie.” She hung her head.

  Opening the car door I said, “Come with me, Pris.”

  She shut off the motor and car lights and slid out; I took hold of her by the arm.

  “Is this the first step in delicious intimacy?” she asked.

  “I’m acquainting you with the unspeakable.”

  “I just want to be able to talk about it, I don’t want to have to do it. Of course you’re joking; we’re going to sit side by side and then I’ll go home. That’s best for both of us, in fact it’s the only course open.”

  We entered the dark little motel room and I switched on the light and then the heat and then the TV set.

  “Is that so no one will hear us panting?” She shut off the TV set. “I pant very lightly; it isn’t necessary.” Removing her coat she stood holding it until I took it and hung it in the closet. “Now tell me where to sit and how. In that chair?” She seated herself in a straight chair, folded her hands in her lap and regarded me solemnly. “How’s this? What else should I take off? Shoes? All my clothes? Or do you like to do it? If you do, my skirt doesn’t unzip; it unbuttons, and be careful you don’t pull too hard or the top button will come off and then I’ll have to sew it back.” She twisted around to show me. “There the buttons are, on the side.”

  “All this is educational,” I said, “but not illuminating.”

  “Do you know what I’d like?” Her face lit up. “I want you to drive out somewhere and come back with some kosher corned beef and Jewish bread and ale and some halvah for dessert. That wonderful thin-sliced corned beef that’s two-fifty a pound.”

  “I’d like to,” I said, “but there’s no place within hundreds of miles to get it.”

  “Can’t you get it in Boise?”

  “No.” I hung up my own coat. “It’s too late for kosher corned beef anyhow. I don’t mean too late in the evening. I mean too late in our lives.” Seating myself across from her I drew my chair close and took hold of her hands. They were
dry, small and quite hard. From all her tile-cutting she had developed sinewy arms, strong fingers. “Let’s run off. Let’s drive south and never come back, never see the simulacra again or Sam Barrows or Ontario, Oregon.”

  “No,” Pris said. “We’re compelled to tangle with Sam; can’t you feel it around us, in the air? I’m surprised at you, imagining that you can hop in the car and drive off. It can’t be evaded.”

  “Forgive me,” I said.

  “I forgive you but I can’t understand you; sometimes you seem like a baby, unexposed to life.”

  “What I’ve done,” I said, “is I’ve hacked out little portions of reality here and there and familiarized myself with them, somewhat on the model of a sheep who’s learned a route across a pasture and never deviates from that route.”

  “You feel safe by doing that?”

  “I feel safe mostly, but never around you.”

  She nodded. “I’m the pasture itself, to you.”

  “That expresses it.”

  With a sudden laugh she said, “It’s just like being made love to by Shakespeare. Louis, you can tell me you’re going to crop, browse, graze among my lovely hills and valleys and in particular my divinely-wooded meadows, you know, where the fragrant wild ferns and grasses wave in profusion. I don’t need to spell it out, do I?” Her eyes flashed. “Now for Christ’s sake, take off my clothes or at least make the attempt to.” She began to pull off her shoes.

  “No,” I said.

  “Haven’t we gotten through the poetry stage long ago? Can’t we dispense with more of that and get down to the real thing?” She started to unfasten her skirt, but I took hold of her hands and stopped her.

  “I’m too ignorant to proceed,” I said. “I just don’t have it, Pris. Too ignorant and too awkward and too cowardly. Things have already gone far beyond my limited comprehension. I’m lost in a realm I don’t understand.” I held on tightly to her hands. “The best I can think of to do, the best I can manage at this time, would be to kiss you. Maybe on the cheek, if it’s okay.”

  “You’re old,” Pris said. “That’s it. You’re part of a dying world of the past.” She turned her head and leaned toward me. “As a favor to you I’ll let you kiss me.”

  I kissed her on the cheek.

  “Actually,” Pris said, “if you want to know the facts, the fragrant wild ferns and grasses don’t wave in profusion; there’s a couple of wild ferns and about four grasses and that’s it. I’m hardly grown, Louis. I only started wearing a bra a year ago and sometimes I forget it even now; I hardly need it.”