Mr Strunk, George supposes, tries to nail him down with a word. Queer, he doubtless growls. But, since this is after all the year nineteen sixty-two, even he may be expected to add, I don’t give a damn what he does just as long as he stays away from me. Even psychologists disagree as to the conclusions which may be reached about the Mr Strunks of this world, on the basis of such a remark. The fact remains that Mr Strunk himself, to judge from a photograph of him taken in football uniform at college, used to be what many would call a living doll.
But Mrs Strunk, George feels sure, takes leave to differ gently from her husband; for she is trained in the new tolerance, the technique of annihilation by blandness. Out comes her psychology book – bell and candle are no longer necessary. Reading from it in sweet singsong she proceeds to exorcise the unspeakable out of George. No reason for disgust, she intones, no cause for condemnation. Nothing here that is wilfully vicious. All is due to heredity, early environment (shame on those possessive mothers, those sex-segregated British schools!), arrested development at puberty, and/or glands. Here we have a misfit, debarred forever from the best things of life, to be pitied, not blamed. Some cases, caught young enough, may respond to therapy. As for the rest – ah, it’s so sad; especially when it happens, as let’s face it it does, to truly worthwhile people, people who might have had so much to offer. (Even when they are geniuses in spite of it, their masterpieces are invariably warped.) So let us be understanding, shall we, and remember that, after all, there were the Greeks (though that was a bit different, because they were pagans rather than neurotics). Let us even go so far as to say that this kind of relationship can sometimes be almost beautiful – particularly if one of the parties is already dead; or, better yet, both.
How dearly Mrs Strunk would enjoy being sad about Jim! But, aha, she doesn’t know; none of them know. It happened in Ohio, and the L.A. papers didn’t carry the story. George has simply spread it around that Jim’s folks, who are getting along in years, have been trying to persuade him to come back home and live with them; and that now, as the result of his recent visit to them, he will be remaining in the East indefinitely. Which is the gospel truth. As for the animals, those devilish reminders, George had to get them out of his sight immediately; he couldn’t even bear to think of them being anywhere in the neighbourhood. So, when Mrs Garfein wanted to know if he would sell the mynah bird, he answered that he’d shipped them all back to Jim. A dealer from San Diego took them away.
And now, in reply to the questions of Mrs Strunk and the others, George answers that, yes indeed, he has just heard from Jim and that Jim is fine. They ask him less and less often. They are quite incurious, really.
But your book is wrong, Mrs Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn’t a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you’ll forgive my saying so, anywhere.
Your exorcism has failed, dear Mrs Strunk, says George, squatting on the toilet and peeping forth from his lair to watch her emptying the dustbag of her vacuum cleaner into the trash-can. The unspeakable is still here; right in your very midst.
Damnation. The phone.
Even with the longest cord the phone company will give you, it won’t reach into the bathroom. George gets himself off the seat and shuffles into the study, like a man in a sack-race. ‘Hello.’
‘Hello – is that – it is you, Geo?’
‘Hello, Charley.’
‘I say, I didn’t call too early, did I?’
‘No.’ (Oh dear, she has managed to get him irritated already! Yet how can he reasonably blame her for the discomfort of standing nastily unwiped, with his pants around his ankles? One must admit, though, that Charlotte has a positively clairvoyant knack of picking the wrong moment to call.)
‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. I’ve already had breakfast.’
‘I was afraid, if I waited any longer, you’d have gone off to the college. . . . My goodness, I hadn’t noticed it was so late! Oughtn’t you to have started already?’
‘This is the day I have only one class. It doesn’t begin until eleven-thirty. My early days are Mondays and Wednesdays.’ (All this explained in a tone of slightly emphasised patience.)
‘Oh yes – yes, of course! How stupid of me! I always forget.’
(A silence. George knows she wants to ask him something. But he won’t help her. He is rubbed up the wrong way by her blunderings. Why does she imply that she ought to know his college schedule? Just more of her possessiveness. And why, if she really thinks she ought to know it, does she get it all mixed up?)
‘Geo —’ (very humbly) ‘would you possibly be free tonight?’
‘Afraid not. No.’ (One second before speaking, he couldn’t have told you what he was going to answer. It’s the desperation in Charlotte’s voice that decides him. He isn’t in the mood for one of her crises.)
‘Oh – I see. . . . I was afraid you wouldn’t be. It is short notice, I know.’ (She sounds half stunned, very quiet, hopeless. He stands there listening for a sob. None can be heard. His face is puckered into a grimace of guilt and discomfort – the latter caused by his increasing awareness of stickiness and trussed ankles.)
‘I suppose you couldn’t – I mean – I suppose it’s something important?’
‘I’m afraid it is.’ (The grimace of guilt relaxes. He is mad at her now. He won’t be nagged at.)
‘I see. . . . Oh well, never mind.’ (She’s brave, now.) ‘I’ll try you again, may I, in a few days?’
‘Of course.’ (Oh – why not be a little nicer, now she’s been put in her place?) ‘Or I’ll call you.’
(A pause.)
‘Well – goodbye, Geo.’
‘Goodbye, Charley.’
Twenty minutes later, Mrs Strunk, out on her porch watering the hibiscus bushes, watches him back his car out across the bridge. (It is sagging badly, nowadays. She hopes he will have it fixed; one of the children might get hurt.) As he makes the half-turn on to the street, she waves to him. He waves to her.
Poor man, she thinks, living there all alone. He has a kind face.
It is one of the marvels and blessings of the Los Angeles freeway system that you can now get from the beach to San Tomas State College in fifty minutes, give or take five, instead of the nearly two hours you would have spent, in the slow old days, crawling from stoplight to stoplight clear across the downtown area and out into the suburbs beyond.
George feels a kind of patriotism for the freeways. He is proud that they are so fast, that people get lost on them and even sometimes panic and have to bolt for safety down the nearest cutoff. George loves the freeways because he can still cope with them; because the fact that he can cope proves his claim to be a functioning member of society. He can still get by.
(Like everyone with an acute criminal complex, George is hyperconscious of all bylaws, city ordinances, rules and petty regulations. Think of how many Public Enemies have been caught just because they neglected to pay a parking ticket! Never once has he seen his passport stamped at a frontier, his driver’s licence accepted by a post office clerk as evidence of identity, without whispering gleefully to himself, idiots – fooled them again!)
He will fool them again this morning, in there, in the midst of the mad metropolitan chariot race – Ben Hur would certainly chicken out – jockeying from lane to lane with the best of them, never dropping below eighty in the fast left lane, never getting rattled when a crazy teenager hangs on to his tail or a woman (it all comes of letting them go first through doorways) cuts in sharply ahead of him. The cops on their motorcycles will detect nothing, yet, to warn them to roar in pursuit flashing their red lights, to signal him off to the side, out of the running, and thence to escort him kindly but ever so firmly to some beautifully ordered nursery-community where Senior Citizens (old, in our Country of the Bland, has become nearly as dirty a word as kike or nigger) are eased into senility, retaught their childhood games but with a difference; it’s known as passive recreation now. Oh, by all means let them screw, if they can still cut the mustard; and, if they can’t, let them indulge without inhibitions in babylike erotic play. Let them get married, even – at eighty, at ninety, at a hundred – who cares? Anything to keep them busy and stop them wandering around blocking the traffic.
There’s always a slightly unpleasant moment when you drive up the ramp which leads on to the freeway and become what’s called merging traffic. George has that nerve-crawling sensation which can’t be removed by simply checking the rearview mirror; that, inexplicably, invisibly, he’s about to be hit in the back. And then, next moment, he has merged and is away, out in the clear, climbing the long easy gradient toward the top of the pass and the Valley beyond.
And now, as he drives, it is as if some kind of autohypnosis exerts itself. We see the face relax, the shoulders unhunch themselves, the body ease itself back into the seat. The reflexes are taking over; the left foot comes down with firm even pressure on the clutch-pedal, while the right prudendy feeds in gas. The left hand is light on the wheel; the right slips the gearshift with precision into high. The eyes, moving unhurriedly from road to mirror, mirror to road, calmly measure the distances ahead, behind, to the nearest car. . . . After all, this is no mad chariot race – that’s only how it seems to onlookers or nervous novices – it is a river, sweeping in full flood toward its outlet with a soothing power. There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease.
And now something new starts happening to George. The face is becoming tense again, the muscles bulge slightly at the jaw, the mouth tightens and twitches, the lips are pressed together in a grim line, there is a nervous contraction between the eyebrows. And yet, while all this is going on, the rest of the body remains in a posture of perfect relaxation. More and more, it appears to separate itself, to become a separate entity; an impassive anonymous chauffeur-figure with little will or individuality of its own, the very embodiment of muscular coordination, lack of anxiety, tactful silence, driving its master to work.
And George, like a master who has entrusted the driving of his car to a servant, is now free to direct his attention elsewhere. As they sweep over the crest of the pass, he is becoming less and less aware of externals; the cars all around, the dip of the freeway ahead, the Valley with its homes and gardens opening below, under a long brown smear of smog beyond and above which the big barren mountains rise. He has gone deep down inside himself.
What is he up to?
On the edge of the beach, a huge insolent high-rise which will contain one hundred apartments is growing up within its girders; it will block the view along the coast from the park on the cliffs above. A spokesman for this project says, in answer to objections, well, that’s Progress. And anyhow, he implies, if there are people who are prepared to pay $450 a month for this view by renting our apartments, why should you park-users (and that includes George) get it for free?
A local newspaper editor has started a campaign against sex deviates (by which he means people like George). They are everywhere, he says; you can’t go into a bar any more, or a men’s room, or a public library, without seeing hideous sights. And they all, without exception, have syphilis. The existing laws against them, he says, are far too lenient.
A senator has recently made a speech, declaring that we should attack Cuba right now, with everything we’ve got, lest the Monroe Doctrine be held cheap and of no account. The senator does not deny that this will probably mean rocket-war. We must face this fact; the alternative is dishonour. We must be prepared to sacrifice three quarters of our population (including George).
It would be amusing, George thinks, to sneak into that apartment building at night, just before the tenants moved in, and spray all the walls of all the rooms with a specially prepared odorant which would be scarcely noticeable at first but which would gradually grow in strength until it reeked like rotting corpses. They would try to get rid of it with every deodorant known to science, but in vain; and when they had finally in desperation ripped out the plaster and woodwork, they would find that the girders themselves were stinking. They would abandon the place as the Khmers did Angkor; but its stink would grow and grow until you could smell it clear up the coast to Malibu. So at last the entire structure would have to be taken apart by workers in gas-masks and ground to powder and dumped far out in the ocean. . . . Or perhaps it would be more practical to discover a kind of virus which would eat away whatever it is that makes metal hard. The advantage that this would have over the odorant would be that only a single injection in one spot would be necessary; for the virus would then eat through all the metal in the building. And then, when everybody had moved in and while a big housewarming party was in progress, the whole thing would sag and subside into a limp tangled heap, like spaghetti.
Then that newspaper editor, George thinks, how funny to kidnap him and the staff-writers responsible for the sex-deviate articles – and maybe also the Police Chief, and the head of the Vice Squad, and those ministers who endorsed the campaign from their pulpits – and take them all to a secret underground movie studio where, after a little persuasion – no doubt just showing them the red-hot pokers and pincers would be quite sufficient – they would perform every possible sexual act, in pairs and in groups, with a display of the utmost enjoyment. The film would then be developed and prints of it would be rushed to all the movie theatres. George’s assistants would chloroform the ushers so the lights couldn’t be turned up, lock the exits, overpower the projectionists, and proceed to run the film under the heading of Coming Attractions.
And as for that senator, wouldn’t it be rather amusing to —
No.
(At this point, we see the eyebrows contract in a more than usually violent spasm, the mouth thin to knife-blade grimness.)
No. Amusing is not the word. These people are not amusing. They should never be dealt with amusingly. They understand only one language: brute force.
Therefore we must launch a campaign of systematic terror. In order to be effective, this will require an organisation of at least five hundred highly skilled killers and torturers, all dedicated individuals. The head of the organisation will draw up a list of clearly defined, simple objectives; such as the removal of that apartment building, the suppression of that newspaper, the retirement of that senator. They will then be dealt with in order, regardless of the time taken or the number of casualties. In each case, the principal criminal will first receive a polite note, signed Uncle George, explaining exactly what he must do before a certain deadline if he wants to stay alive. It will also be explained to him that Uncle George operates on the theory of guilt by association.