The Simulacra (3 page)

Going to the closet of his apartment, Ian Duncan bent down and carefully lifted a cloth-wrapped object into the light. We had so much youthful faith in this, he recalled. Tenderly, he unwrapped the jug; then, taking a deep breath, he blew a couple of hollow notes on it. Duncan & Miller and Their Two-man Jug Band, he and Al Miller had been, playing their own arrangement for two jugs of Bach and Mozart and Stravinsky. But the White House talent scout—the skunk. He had never even given them a fair audition. It had been done, he told them. Jesse Pigg, the fabulous jug-artist from Alabama, had gotten to the White House first, entertaining and delighting the dozen and one members of the Thibodeaux family gathered there with his versions of “Derby Ram” and “John Henry” and the like.

“But,” Ian Duncan had protested, “this is
classical
jug. We play late Beethoven sonatas.”

“We’ll call you,” the talent scout had said briskly. “If Nicky shows an interest at any time in the future.”

Nicky! He had blanched. Imagine being that intimate to the First Family. He and Al, mumbling pointlessly, had retired from the stage with their jugs, making way for the next act, a group of dogs dressed up in Elizabethan costumes portraying characters from
Hamlet.
The dogs had not made it, either, but that was little consolation.

“I am told,” Nicole was saying, “that there is so little light in the ocean depths that, well, observe this strange fellow.” A fish, sporting a glowing lantern before him, swam across the TV screen.

Startling him, there came a knock on the apartment door.

With caution, Ian Duncan answered it. He found his neighbor Mr. Stone standing there, looking nervous.

“You weren’t at All Souls?” Edgar Stone said. “Won’t they check and find out?” He held in his hands Ian Duncan’s corrected test.

Duncan said, “Tell me how I did.” He prepared himself.

Entering the apartment, Stone shut the door after him. He glanced at the TV set, saw Nicole seated with the oceanographers, listened for a moment to her, then abruptly said in a hoarse voice, “You did fine.” He held out the test.

“I
passed?
” Duncan could not believe it. He accepted the papers, examining them with incredulity. And then he understood what had happened.

Stone had conspired to see that he passed. He had falsified the score, probably out of humanitarian motives. Duncan raised his head and they looked at each other, neither speaking. This is terrible, Duncan thought. What’ll I do now? His reaction amazed him, but there it was.

I wanted to fail,
he realized. Why? So I can get out of here, so I would have an excuse to give up all this, my apartment and my job, say fork it and go. Emigrate with nothing more than the shirt on my back, in a jalopy that falls to pieces the moment it comes to rest in the Martian wilderness.

“Thanks,” he said glumly.

In a rapid voice, Stone said, “Y-you can do the same for me, sometime.”

“Oh yeah, be happy to,” Duncan said.

Scuttling back out of the apartment, Stone left him alone with the TV set, his jug and the falsely corrected test papers, and his thoughts.

THREE

One would have to go back to the year 1994, the year that West Germany entered the Union as the fifty-third of the United States, to understand why Vince Strikerock, an American citizen and an inhabitant of The Abraham Lincoln Apartments, was listening to der Alte on the television set while he shaved, the next morning. There was something about this particular der Alte, President Rudi Kalbfleisch, which always irritated him, and it would be a great thing when Kalbfleisch, in two more years, reached the end of his term and had, by law, to retire. It was always a great thing, a good day, when the law got one of them out of office; Vince always found it worth celebrating.

Nonetheless, Vince felt, it was best to do all that was possible with the old man while he remained in office, and so he put down his razor and went into the living room to fiddle with the knobs of the TV set. He adjusted the n, the r and b knobs, and hopefully anticipated a turn for the better in the dire droning-on of the speech . . . however, no change took place. Too many other viewers had their own ideas as to what the old man ought to be saying, Vince realized. In fact there were probably enough other people in this one apartment building alone to offset any pressures he might try to exert on the old man through his particular set. But anyhow that was democracy. Vince sighed. This was what they had wanted: a government receptive to what the people said. He returned to the bathroom and continued shaving.

“Hey, Julie!” he called to his wife. “Is breakfast about ready?” He heard no sound of her stirring about in the kitchen of the apartment. And come to think of it, he hadn’t noticed her beside him in bed as he had groggily gotten up this morning.

All at once he remembered. Last night after All Souls he and Julie, after a particularly bitter fight, had gotten divorced, had gone down to the building’s M & D Commissioner and filled out the D papers. Julie had packed her things then and there; he was alone in the apartment—no one was fixing his breakfast and unless he got busy he would miss it entirely.

It was a shock, because this particular marriage had endured for
six entire months
and he had become thoroughly used to seeing her in the mornings. She knew just how he liked his eggs (cooked with a small amount of mild Munster cheese). Damn the new permissive divorce legislation that old President Kalbfleisch had ushered in! Damn Kalbfleisch in general; why didn’t the old man turn over and die some afternoon during his famous two o’clock nap? But then of course another der Alte would simply take his place. And even the old man’s death wouldn’t bring Julie back; that lay outside the area of USEA bureaucracy, vast as it was.

Savagely, he went to the TV set and pressed the s knob; if enough citizens pushed it, the old man would stop entirely—the stop knob meant total cessation of the mumbling speech. Vince waited, but the speech went on.

And then it struck him as odd that there should be a speech so early in the morning; after all, it was only eight A.M. Perhaps the entire lunar colony had gone up in a single titanic explosion of its fuel depot. The old man would be telling them that more belt-tightening was required, in order to restock the space program; these and other quaint calamities had to be expected. Or perhaps at last some authentic remains of a sentient race had been unearthed—or was the term unmarsed?—on the fourth planet, hopefully not in the French area but in, as der Alte liked to phrase it, “one’s own.” You Prussian bastards, Vince thought. We never should have admitted you into what I like to phrase as “our tent,” our federal union, which should have been confined to the Western Hemisphere. But the world has shrunk. When you are founding a colony millions of miles away on another moon or planet, the three thousand miles separating New York from Berlin did not seem meaningful. And god knew the Germans in Berlin were willing.

Picking up the phone, Vince called the manager of the apartment building. “My wife Julie—I mean my ex-wife—did she take another apartment last night?” If he could locate her he could perhaps have breakfast with her and that would be cheering. He listened hopefully.

“No, Mr. Strikerock.” A pause. “Not according to our records.”

Aw hell, Vince thought, and hung up.

What was marriage, anyhow? An arrangement of sharing things, such as right now being able to discuss the meaning of der Alte giving an eight A.M. speech and getting someone else—his wife—to fix breakfast while he prepared to go to his job at Karp u. Sohnen Werke’s Detroit branch. Yes, it meant an arrangement in which one could get another person to do certain things one didn’t like to do, such as cooking meals; he hated having to eat food which he had prepared himself. Single, he would eat at the building’s cafeteria; he foresaw that, based on past experience. Mary, Jean, Laura, now Julie; four marriages and the last the shortest. He was going downhill. Maybe, god forbid, he was a latent queer.

On the TV, der Alte uttered, “... and paramilitary activity recalls the Days of Barbarism and hence is doubly to be renounced.”

Days of Barbarism—that was the sweet-talk for the Nazi Period of the middle part of the previous century, now gone nearly a century but still vividly, if distortedly, recalled. So der Alte had taken to the airwaves to denounce the Sons of Job, the latest nut organization of a quasi-religious nature flapping about in the streets, proclaiming a purification of national ethnic life, etc. or whatever it was they proclaimed. In other words, stiff legislation to bar persons from public life who were odd—those born specially, due to the years of radiation fallout from bomb testing, in particular from the vicious People’s China blasts.

That would mean Julie, Vince conjectured, since she’s sterile. Because she could not bear children she would not be permitted to vote . . . a rather neurotic connective, logically possible only in the minds of a Central European people such as the Germans. The tail that wags the dog, he said to himself as he dried his face. We in
Nord Amerika
are the dog; the Reich is the tail. What a life. Maybe I ought to emigrate to colonial reality, live under a faint, fitful, pale-yellow sun where even things with eight legs and a stinger get to vote . . . no Sons of Job, there. Not that all the special people were that special, but a good many of them had seen fit—and for good reason—to emigrate. As had quite a number of quite unspecial folk who were simply tired of the overpopulated, bureaucratically-controlled life on Terra these days, whether in the USEA, in the French Empire, or in People’s Asia, or Free—that is, black—Africa.

In the kitchen he fixed himself bacon and eggs. And, while the bacon cooked, he fed the sole pet allowed him in the apartment building: George III, his small green turtle. George III ate dried flies (twenty-five percent protein, more nourishing than human food), hamburger, and ant eggs, a breakfast which caused Vince Strikerock to ponder on the axiom
de gustibus non disputandum
est—
there’s no accounting for other people’s tastes, especially at eight in the morning.

Even as recently as five years ago he could have possessed a pet bird in The Abraham Lincoln, but that was now ruled out. Too noisy, really. Building Rule s205; thou shalt not whistle, sing, tweet or chirp. A turtle was mute—as was a giraffe, but giraffes were verboten, too, along with the quondam friends of man, the dog and cat, the companions which had vanished back in the days of der Alte Frederich Hempel, whom Vince barely remembered. So it could not have been the quality of muteness, and he was left, as so often before, merely to guess at the reasoning of the Party bureaucracy. He could not genuinely fathom its motives, and in a sense for that he was glad. It proved that he was not spiritually a part of it.

On the TV the withered, elongated, near-senile face had vanished and a moment of music, a purely audible event, had replaced it. Percy Grainger, a tune called “Handel on the Strand,” as banal as could be . . . just the appropriate postscript to what had come before, Vince reflected. He clicked his heels abruptly, came to attention, in a parody of Germanic military stiffness, chin up, arms rigid, as the melody tinkled from the speaker of the TV set; Vince Strikerock at attention to this child’s music which the authorities, the so-called
Ges,
saw fit to play. Heil, Vince said to himself, and raised his arm in the ancient Nazi salute.

The music tinkled on.

Vince turned to another channel.

And there, on the screen, a hounded-looking man fleetingly appeared, in the midst of a crowd which seemed to be cheering him; the man, with what were obviously police on both sides of him, disappeared into a parked vehicle. At the same time the newscaster declared, “. . . and, just as in hundreds of other cities across the USEA, Dr. Jack Dowling, leading psychiatrist of the Vienna School here in Bonn, is taken into custody as he protests the newly-signed-into-law bill, the McPhearson Act . . .”

On the screen the vehicle, a marked police car, zipped away.

A hell of a note, Vince thought glumly. Sign of the times; more repressive, scared legislation by the establishment. So who am I going to get help from if Julie’s departure causes me to break down mentally? As well it might. I’ve never consulted an analyst—I’ve never needed to in my entire life. But this . . . nothing like this, precisely this bad, has ever happened to me. Julie, he thought, where are you?

Now, on the TV screen, the scene changed, and yet it remained the same. Vince Strikerock saw a new crowd, different police, another psychoanalyst being led off; another protesting soul taken into custody.

“It is interesting,” the TV set murmured, “to observe the loyalty of the analyst’s patient. And yet, why not? This man has placed his faith in psychoanalysis possibly for years.”

And where did it get him? Vince wondered.

Julie, he said to himself, if you’re with someone, some other man right now, there’s going to be trouble. Either I’ll drop dead—either it will kill me outright—or I’m going to give it to you and that individual, whoever he is. Even if,
especially
if, he’s a friend of mine.

I’m going to get you back, he decided. My relationship with you is unique, not like that with Mary, Jean and Laura. I love you; that’s it. My god, he thought, I’m in love! And in this day and age. Incredible. If I told her, if she knew, she’d laugh her head off. That’s Julie.

I should go to an analyst, he realized, for being in a state like this, for being totally psychologically dependent on a cold, selfish creature like Julie for existence itself. Hell, it’s unnatural. And—it’s folly.

Could Dr. Jack Dowling, leading psychiatrist of the Vienna School in Bonn, Germany, cure me? Free me? Or this other man they’re showing, this—he listened to the newscaster, who droned on as the police vehicle drove away—Egon Superb. He had looked like an intelligent, sympathetic person, gifted with the balm of empathic understanding. Listen, Egon Superb, Vince thought, I’m in deep trouble; my tiny world collapsed this morning when I woke up. I need a woman whom I’ll probably never see again. A.G. Chemie’s drugs can’t help me with this . . . except, perhaps, a mortal overdose. And that’s not the sort of help I’m after.

Maybe I should roust out my brother Chic and both of us join the Sons of Job, he thought abruptly. Chic and I swear fealty to Bertold Goltz. Others have done so, other malcontents, others who have dismally failed, either in their private lives—as I have—or in business or in their social ascent from
Be
to
Ge.

Chic and I, Sons of Job, Vince Strikerock thought eerily. In bizarre uniform, parading down the street. Being jeered at. And yet believing—in what? In ultimate victory? In Goltz, who looks like a movie version of a
Rattenfänger,
a ratcatcher? He cringed from the notion; it frightened him.

And still the idea remained lodged in his mind.

In his apartment on the top floor of The Abraham Lincoln Apartments, thin, balding Chic Strikerock, Vince’s older brother, awoke and peered nearsightedly at the clock to see if one could manage to remain in bed a bit longer. But the excuse was not valid; the clock read eight-fifteen. Time to get up . . . a news machine, noisily vending its wares outside the building, had awakened him, fortunately. And then Chic discovered to his shock that someone was in bed with him; he opened his eyes fully and made himself rigid as he inspected the covered outline of what he saw at once, from the tumble of brown hair, was a young woman, and one familiar (that was a relief—or was it?) to him. Julie! His sister-in-law, his brother Vince’s wife. Good grief. Chic sat up.

Let’s see, he said to himself, rapidly. Last night—what did go on here after All Souls, anyhow? Julie appeared, didn’t she, distraught, with one suitcase and two coats and telling a disjointed story which boiled down to a simple fact, at last; she had broken up with Vince legally; she no longer had any official relationship to him and was free to come and go as she pleased. So here she was. Why? That part he couldn’t remember; he had always liked Julie but—it did not explain this; what she had done concerned her own secret, inner world of values and attitudes, not his, not anything that was objective,
real.

Anyhow, here Julie was, still sound asleep, too, here physically but withdrawn into herself, curled up, retracted mollusk-like, which was just as well, because for him it all seemed—incestuous, despite the clarity of the law in this variety of matter. She, to him, was more like family. He had never looked in her direction. But last night, after a few drinks—that was it; he could not drink any more. Or rather he could, and when he did he underwent a rapid change for what at the time seemed like the better; he became outgoing, adventurous, extroverted, instead of morose and taciturn. But here was a consequence. Look what he had gotten involved in, here.

And yet on a very deep, private level he didn’t object as much as all that. It was a compliment to him, her showing up here.

But it would be awkward, the next time he ran into Vince checking everyone’s ID at the front door. Because Vince would want to discuss it on a profound, meaningful, somber basis, with much intellectual hot air wasted in analyzing basic motives. What was Julie’s
real
purpose for leaving him and moving in here? Why? Ontological questions, such as Aristotle would have appreciated, teleological issues having to do with what they had once called “final causes.” Vince was out of step with the times; this had all become null and void.