The Complete Roderick (59 page)

As they drove on, Roderick asked Norm how he had developed his curious hobby.

‘Hobby’ I guess it is. Well I guess it all started when I was about ten. Dad gave me this pocket calculator, you know? And I really liked it. I um had fun just multiplying two times two, stuff like that. I mean calculating gave me this special feeling.’

‘What feeling?’

‘Okay, okay, it gave me a hard-on, calculating gave me a hard-on. I was only ten, didn’t hardly know – okay maybe I did know but it didn’t seem so wrong. I mean I just kept the thing in my pants pocket and um worked out a few things in secret now and then. I used to pretend it was the real thing.’

‘A woman, Norm?’

‘No, a
computer.
Maybe an IBM 360, boy what a figure –’

‘What happened then?’

Norm stopped for a red light. A drunken man was feeling his way across the street, trying to get into one car, then another, shouting at their occupants.

‘Well, Dad caught me once. He said I’d go blind and lose strength from all the calculating, but I didn’t care. I had to go on adding, subtracting … even when we played sandlot baseball I had to stop all the time and work out my batting average. And pretty soon I stopped playing any games at all, I just, you know?

‘So then when I was about fifteen I started hanging out in the crummy part of town, I started running errands for this bookie. And he had this, well this older computer, she’d been through a lot of weird programs, stuff I’d never dreamed of I mean she really taught me a lot. I learned so much I figured I was cured, you know? When we broke up I figured I was burnt out and cured.

‘So I went away to college, got along okay only I couldn’t help noticing computers. Like the freshman registration computer, she was big. Dumb, but really big, you know? Meanwhile I met this
really nice girl, a real girl, and we got engaged. We were gonna marry after graduation.

‘Graduation night there was a big party and I got real drunk, and somehow we all ended up at this computer dating agency. So the others are standing there filling out forms and giggling, and the girl behind the counter goes out of the room for something – and there I am, face to face with a big beautiful machine! In about one second flat I’m over that counter and all over her.’

‘How did you feel, Norm?’

‘Good at first, and then – disgusted. Couldn’t wait to pay my money and get out of there. Goes without saying my engagement was off, all my friends aghast – but I knew then I was hooked, I knew I’d be back! And I was, again and again, until they had to call the cops to get rid of me. Then I started hanging around electronics stores – you ever notice how they always have them on the same streets with sex stores and porno palaces and massage parlours? Ever notice that? The cops would pick me up routinely about once a week. Most of the time they just took me home to Dad.’

‘You didn’t go to jail?’

‘No, because Dad offered to send me for some therapy. We um tried aversion. I went to this guy Dr George. He would show me a picture of a big Univac say, or hand me a magnetic card, or a reel of tape or something, and at the same time he’d give me this electric shock. Trouble is, you can get to like a jolt of current now and then, you can get a special feeling there too.’

Roderick decided to say nothing of his own identity as a cybernetic machine running on electricity.

At the next traffic light they stopped. A group of children trooped across the street, with two adults in charge. Roderick noticed that the little boys had crepe paper beards and the little girls carried stiff styrofoam wings.

‘Norm, I notice you don’t mention your mother much.’

‘Mother?’ Norm frowned. ‘What do you mean, exactly?’

‘Well you had a mother, didn’t you?’

‘Jesus, whose life are we supposed to be talking about, anyway? I mean excuse me, but I thought it was mine. Excuse me all to hell.’

‘I just meant, most people have mothers.’

Norm’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel, as the car shot forward. ‘Oh sure. Most people. I suppose most people can’t buy a computer magazine without blushing. I suppose most people feel all the time like calling up a computer on the phone and inputting dirty data, real dirty data. Oh sure, most people!’

‘What do you remember about your mother, Norm?’

Norm jammed on the brakes, and the car skidded to an oblique stop. Tears were streaming down his face. ‘You keep that up and you can just get out and walk. You hear me?’

Roderick looked out at the bleak, icy road, the mountainous snowbanks, the blackness beyond. They were somewhere in the edge of a suburb, and there was nothing to be seen but falling snow and the darkness that might be trees. Large wet flakes drifted through the headlight beams.

‘I’m really looking forward to this party,’ he said. ‘Who’s giving it?’

Norm started driving again. ‘Mr Moxon. He’s a friend of my um Dad.’ Soon the car turned off the icy road into a long, heated drive. They drove on, past snow sculptures of men in top hats and women in bonnets, past massed evergreens with programmed lights, past everything, faster, racing headlong like the fastest troika imaginable.

The room was L-shaped, and large enough to accommodate more than one source of music. Around the corner a jukebox glowed from within a fireplace, radiating snatches of warm music to a small circle of admirers (though General Fleischman had located the secret volume control and kept turning it down). At the far end of the long gallery, a man with blue hair and a mirror monocle touched the keys of a white piano and sang:

When lovely woman stoops to polyand-ry

She ends up with more dishes in the sink

And greater loads of melancholy laundry

She’s less appreciated than you think.

The room between was beginning to fill up with life: talking faces, scanning eyes, hands clutching glasses or elbows or
sketching in the air with cigarettes, voices scribbling in one another’s margins.

‘But that’s what I mean, Everett’s friends are all tired grey businessmen or engineers or something, and Francine’s all seem to be mumbling poets with pimply necks, God it’s all so – so haecceitic. I could’ve gone to Nassau …’

‘… was going to New York …’

‘… went to Prague …’

‘… doubled back down Dalecrest Boulevard, see, to catch the Hilldale Expressway through Valecrest, but guess what?’

‘Silicon, darling. Or do I mean silicone? Silly something, anyway. H.G. Wells said it was the basis of all life, imagine!’

Someone liked Rodin’s
Thinker,
someone complained of sinus trouble in Prague, someone else had lost money selling KUR shares too soon, so who said there was a Sandy Claus?

Father Warren, looking lean and aescetic as always despite the splendour of his black leather cassock, accepted a glass of sherry and glided on to the jukebox area to speak with General Fleischman.

The general was a tall, broad-shouldered old man with a deep tan and frothy white sideburns. Since his retirement from the Army he had been running a bank, but he still hoped for a job in Washington – maybe as a minor White House adviser. At the moment he was holding forth on puppet governments to Dr Tarr’s secretary, Judi Mazzini. She looked as though she’d rather be doing her nails.

‘Ruritania? General, I couldn’t even find it on a map.’

‘Nobody can, honey, that’s the trouble with we Americans. We tend to devisualize backdrop situations, we play down the role of unhostile puppets – Oh hello, padre. Like to have you meet Judi …’

But with a smile of apology she escaped, all but colliding with an Oriental waiter who managed to recover without spilling a drop of the foamy pink cocktail he was carrying the length of the room to a jowly woman in purple who said again:

‘But don’t you just love his
Thinker?’

The boy with the straggly beard was cautious; he believed they were talking about a Japanese movie monster: the giant flying
reptile
Rodan.
‘His thinker, eh? Well I guess I maybe missed that …’

She now tasted the foamy drink and waved it away, her hand glittering with amethysts. ‘No I’m sorry but I just can’t drink that. Toy, you won’t be angry with me?’

The waiter smiled. ‘Not at all, Mrs Fleischman.’

‘Now you just take that back to the bartender and tell him it’s just too oh never mind, just bring me a gin and ton.’

When the waiter was not quite out of earshot she said, ‘Toy’s a treasure, wonder where Francine found him? He even pronounces my name right. I thought he’d be calling me Mrs Freshman, most of these, these people – but anyway, what were you saying, sweetie? How could you talk about Rodin and leave out his
Thinker?’

The bearded boy stammered out something about Tokyo burning and special effects, adding, ‘Not that I guess it’s exactly Hugo material but –’

‘Yas, yas, his
Hugo
did have a lot of problems and finally they never did put it up at all – oh here’s Everett. Everett, sweetie, I want a word with you.’ Her ringed hand snagged the sleeve of a well-cut dinner jacket.

‘Hello, Thelma,’ he said, smiling. ‘Let me rustle up a drink for you.’ He moved on quickly, past the white piano, past voices expressing disappointment with an old city, delight with a new diet, faith in a second-hand religion.

‘That’s Everett,’ said someone.

‘Who?’

‘Our host, Everett Moxon.’

‘Isn’t his head small?’

‘Small?’

‘I don’t mean he wears a doughnut for a hat, I don’t even mean he’s a new Anatole France. I just meant – I think I must need a pill with this scotch.’

A pillbox was offered. ‘Here, have one of mine. Libidon this side, Solacyl that side.’

Moxon veered past the South sofa and paused to smile on the beauty of Mrs McBabbitt.

Connie McBabbitt was breathtakingly beautiful. Usually at a party she found a place to pose gracefully and remained there for
the evening. Tonight she reclined with one elbow on the arm of the sofa, her hands clasped and her chin lifted upon a forefinger. The idea was for men to spend the evening lusting and longing after the curve of ivory cheek, throat, breast, the voluptuous swathe of black velvet, the old-fashioned obviousness of her perfection. If she did resemble a 1950s model, it was because that was the era of preference of the plastic surgeon who had created her.

Ten years of surgery, stage by stage, beginning with a resectioning of her pelvis and finishing with a quantity of fresh skin, had tightened the screw of beauty turn by turn until no more could be done – she hardly used makeup.

‘Everett, what a gorgeous party.’ Her voice too had been adjusted to a slight huskiness. ‘You seem to know so many people – didn’t I just see Edd McFee a minute ago? The painter?’

‘Could be, Connie. I sometimes feel a little lost at these affairs myself. Let me introduce you to Mr Vitanuova.’

The little square, thick man almost bowed over her hand. ‘Call me Joe,’ he said, regarding her through his grey eyebrows. ‘May I say that you are the most beautiful woman in the place? If not in the city? No offence to the other classy dolls, but you are
class.’

‘Thank you, Joe. What do you do? Sculptor, maybe?’

He spread his wide face in a smile and his wide hands in a kind of blessing. ‘Not exactly. I’m in garbage, mainly. Okay, laugh if you want.’

A faint blush tinged the ivory. ‘Why should I laugh?’

‘Everybody does. Not that I care, I’m not ashamed. I got me two incinerating plants now, sent all my kids to good schools out East, and now I branched out into a lot of other diversified interests …’

Behind him Mrs Doody was saying, ‘Oh, Everett and I are old friends, old buddies. See my ex married his ex’s first husband’s widow, if you can work that out! You wouldn’t by any chance have a ciggy, would you?’

Beyond her someone turned to catch a drink off a passing tray, saying, ‘Systems analyst? I thought you said he was a lay analyst,’ to someone already turning away to catch a glimpse of Indica Dinks in the crowd that was condensing around her even as she moved to the bar.

‘Is there any difference? Some people want to systematize the world, others just want to lay it, is there any difference?’ The figure in a heavy grey cowled sweater turned its back on the celebrity. ‘Maybe Wells was right, then, maybe silicon is the basis of all life; you keep meeting people who act as if they had silicon chips in their heads …’

And in independent efforts to ignore the celebrity, others raised their voices across the room:

‘… well I can well conceptualize that people have trouble finding Ruritania on a map, that should not blind us to the facts about non-hostile puppet …’

‘Isn’t that Lyle who just came in? Lyle whatsisname, the sculptor?’

‘Naw, Lyle’s got this godawful birthmark.’

‘… like you to meet Harry Hatlo, Harry is now a behavioural choreographer, but he used to be in food technology, right? On the research side was it, Harry?’

Feeling for his hairpiece, Mr Hatlo risked a nod. ‘I was what you might call a snack inventor. Only my ideas kept getting more and more kinaesthesic, you know? Like I might sort of start with seeing a new kind of crunch first, and then build a product around it, you know?’

Mr Vitanuova nodded. ‘I know. Like
saltimbocca,
means jumps in the mouth.’

‘Right. And when I invented the dipless chip, the real breakthrough was when I mimed the whole routine myself, in my office – that was how I realized what a downer chip dip can be. See first you gotta buy the mix and take it home, dump it in a bowl and add water, stir it around – and all this is just leading up to the real dipping experience. Which is all that really counts, funfoodwise.’

‘My mother used to make fresh spaghetti –’

‘Yeah, well, so I put the dip
on
the chips, people just dip ’em in water and get all the fun right away. It was that simple.’

Vitanuova turned away briefly. ‘Hell, there’s one of my boys from the demolition company. You wouldn’t believe the goddamn lawsuits that company is getting snarled up in, probably have to liquidate before –’

‘Work, yes, work situations.’ Hatlo performed a shrug. ‘I
applied the same thinking to my own job situation. It turned out that my real job satisfaction wasn’t into food tech at all, but
movement,
you know?’