In which various sets of young people get together

 I

 McClintic Sphere, whose horn man was soloing, stood by the empty piano,  looking off at nothing in particular. He was half listening to the music  (touching the keys of his alto now and again, as if by sympathetic magic to  make that natural horn develop the idea differently, some way Sphere thought  could be better) and half watching the customers at the tables.

This was last set and it'd been a bad week for Sphere. Some of the colleges  were let out and the place had been crowded with these types who liked to  talk to each other a lot. Every now and again, they'd invite him over to a  table between sets and ask him what he thought about other altos. Some of  them would go through the old Northern liberal routine: look at me, I'll sit  with anybody. Either that or they would say: "Hey fella, how about Night  Train?" Yes, bwana. Yazzuh, boss. Dis darkey, ol' Uncle McClintic, he play  you de finest Night Train you evah did hear. An' aftah de set he gwine take  dis of alto an' shove it up yo' white Ivy League ass.

The horn wanted to finish off: he'd been tired all week as Sphere. They took  fours with the drummer, stated the main theme in unison and left the stand.

The bums stood outside like a receiving line. Spring had hit New York all  warm and aphrodisiac. Sphere found his Triumph in the lot, got in and took  off uptown. He needed to relax.

Half an hour later he was in Harlem, in a friendly rooming (and in a sense  cat) house run by one Matilda Winthrop, who was little and wizened and  looked like any elderly little lady you might see in the street going along  with gentle steps in the waning afternoon to look for spleens and greens at  the market.

"She's up there," Matilda said, with a smile for everybody, even musicians  with a headful of righteous moss who were making money and drove sports  cars. Sphere shadowboxed with her for a few minutes. She bad better reflexes  than he did.

The girl was sitting on the bed, smoking and reading a western. Sphere  tossed his coat on a chair. She moved over to make room for him, dogeared a  page, put the book on the floor. Soon he was telling her about the week,  about the kids with money who used him for background music and the  musicians from other bigger groups, also with money, who were cautious and  had mixed reactions and the few who couldn't really afford dollar beers at  the V-Note but did or wanted to understand except that the space they might  have occupied was already taken up by the rich kids and musicians. He told  it all into the pillow and she rubbed his back with amazingly gentle hands.  Her name, she said, was Ruby but he didn't believe that. Soon:

"Do you ever dig what I'm trying to say," he wondered.

"On the horn I don't," she answered, honest enough, "a girl doesn't  understand. All she does is feel. I feel what you play, like I feel what you  need when you're inside me. Maybe they're the same thing. McClintic, I don't  know. You're kind to me, what is it you want?"

"Sorry," he said. After a while, "This is a good way to relax."

"Stay tonight?"

"Sure."

 

Slab and Esther, uncomfortable with each other, stood in front of an easel  in his place, looking at Cheese Danish # 35. The cheese Danish was a recent  obsession of Slab's. He had taken, some time ago, to painting in a frenzy  these morning-pastries in every conceivable style, light and setting. The  room was already littered with Cubist Fauve and Surrealist cheese Danishes.  "Monet spent his declining years at his home in Giverny, painting the water  lilies in the garden pool," reasoned Slab. "He painted all kinds of water  lilies. He liked water lilies. These are my declining years. I like cheese  banishes, they have kept me alive now for longer than I can remember. Why  Dot."

The subject of Cheese Danish # 35 occupied only a small area to the lower  left of center, where it was pictured impaled on one of the metal steps of a  telephone pole. The landscape was an empty street, drastically  foreshortened, the only living things in it a tree in the middle distance,  on which perched an ornate bird, busily textured with a great many swirls,  flourishes and bright-colored patches.

"This," explained Slab in answer to her question, "is my revolt against  Catatonic Expressionism: the universal symbol I have decided will replace  the Cross in western civilization. It is the Partridge in the Pear Tree. You  remember the old Christmas song, which is a linguistic joke. Perdrix, pear  tree. The beauty is that it works like a machine yet is animate. The  partridge eats pears off the tree and his droppings in turn nourish the tree  which groves higher and higher, every day lifting the partridge up and at  the same time assuring him of a continuous supply of good. It is perpetual  motion, except for one thing." He pointed out a gargoyle with sharp fangs  near the top of the picture. The point of the largest fang lay on an  imaginary line projected parallel to the axis of the tree and drawn through  the head of the bird. "It could as well have been a low-flying airplane or  high-tension wire," Slab said. "But someday that bird will be impaled on the  gargoyle's teeth, just like the poor cheese Danish is already on the phone  pole."

"Why can't he fly away?" Esther said.

"He is too stupid. He used to know how to fly once, but he's forgotten."

"I detect allegory in all this," she said.

"No," said Slab. "That is on the same intellectual level as doing the Times  crossword puzzle on Sunday. Phony. Unworthy of you."

She'd wandered to the bed. "No," he almost yelled.

"Slab, it's so bad. It's a physical pain, here." She drew her fingers across  her abdomen.

"I'm not getting any either," said Slab. "I can't help it that Schoenmaker  cut you off."

"Aren't I your friend?"

"No," said Slab.

"What can I do to show you -"

"Go," said Slab, "is what you can do. And let me sleep. In my chaste army  cot. Alone." He crawled to the bed and lay face down. Soon Esther left,  forgetting to close the door. Not being the type to slam doors on being  rejected.

 

Roony and Rachel sat at the bar of a neighborhood tavern on Second Avenue.  Over in the corner an Irishman and a Hungarian were yelling at each other  over the bowling game.

"Where does she go at night," Roony wondered.

"Paola is a strange girl," said Rachel. "You learn after a while not to ask  her questions she doesn't want to answer."

"Maybe seeing Pig."

"No. Pig Bodine lives at the V-Note and the Rusty Spoon. He has a letch for  Paola a mile long but he reminds her too much, I think, of Pappy Hod. The  Navy has a certain way of endearing itself. She stays away from him and it's  killing him and I for one am glad to see it."

It's killing me, Winsome wanted to say. He didn't. Lately he'd been running  for comfort to Rachel. He'd come in a way to depend on it. Her sanity and  aloofness from the Crew, her own self-sufficiency drew him. But he was no  nearer to arranging any assignation with Paola. Perhaps he was afraid of  Rachel's reaction. He was beginning to suspect she was not the sort who  approved of pimping for one's roommate. He ordered another boilermaker.

"Roony, you drink too much," she said. "I worry about you."

"Nag, nag, nag." He smiled.

 

Next evening, Profane was sitting in the guardroom at Anthroresearch  Associates, feet propped on a gas stove, reading an avant-garde western  called Existentialist Sheriff, which Pig Bodine had recommended. Across one  of the laboratory spaces, features lit Frankenstein's-monsterlike by a night  light, facing Profane, sat SHROUD: synthetic human, radiation output  determined.

Its skin was cellulose acetate butyrate, a plastic transparent not only to  light but also to X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Its skeleton had once  been that of a living human; now the bones were decontaminated and the long  ones and spinal column hollowed inside to receive radiation dosimeters.  SHROUD was five feet nine inches tall - the fiftieth percentile of Air Force  standards. The lungs, sex organs, kidneys, thyroid, liver, spleen and other  internal organs were hollow and made of the same clear plastic as the body  shell. These could be filled with aqueous solutions which absorbed the same  amount of radiation as the tissue they represented.

Anthroresearch Associates was a subsidiary of Yoyodyne. It did research for  the government on the effects of high-altitude and space flight; for the  National Safety Council on automobile accidents; and for Civil Defense on  radiation absorption, which was where SHROUD came in. In the eighteenth  century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In  the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a  lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on more as a  heat-engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with  nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which  absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Such at least was Oley Bergomask's  notion of progress. It was the subject of his welcome-aboard lecture on  Profane's first day of employment, at five in the afternoon as Profane was  going on and Bergomask off. There were two eight-hour night shifts, early  and late (though Profane, whose time scale was skewed toward the past,  preferred to call them late and early) and Profane to date had worked them  both.

Three times a night he had to make the rounds of the lab areas, windows and  heavy equipment. If an all-night routine experiment was in progress he'd  have to take readings and if they were out of tolerance wake up the  technician on duty, who'd usually be sleeping on a cot in one of the  offices. At first there'd been a certain interest in visiting the accident  research area, which was jokingly referred to as the chamber of horrors.  Here weights were dropped on aged automobiles, inside which would be sitting  a manikin. The study now under way had to do with first-aid training, and  various versions of SHOCK - synthetic human object, casualty kinematics -  got to sit in the driver's, death, or back seat of the test cars. Profane  still felt a certain kinship with SHOCK, which was the first inanimate  schlemihl he'd ever encountered. But in there too was a certain wariness  because the manikin was still only a "human object"; plus a feeling of  disdain as if SHOCK had decided to sell out to humans; so that now what had  been its inanimate own were taking revenge.

SHOCK was a marvelous manikin. It had the same build as SHROUD but its flesh  was molded of foam vinyl, its skin vinyl plastisol, its hair a wig, its eyes  cosmetic-plastic, its teeth (for which, in fact, Eigenvalue had acted as  subcontractor) the same kind of dentures worn today by 19 per cent of the  American population, most of them respectable. Inside were a blood reservoir  in the thorax, a blood pump in the midsection and a nickel-cadmium battery  power supply in the abdomen. The control panel, at the side of the chest,  had toggles and rheostat controls for venous and arterial bleeding, pulse  rate, and even respiration rate, when a sucking chest wound was involved. In  the latter case plastic lungs provided the necessary suction and bubbling.  They were controlled by an air pump in the abdomen, with the motor's cooling  vent located in the crotch. An injury of the sexual organs could still be  simulated by an attachable moulage, but then this blocked the cooling vent.  SHOCK could not therefore have a sucking chest wound and mutilated sexual  organs simultaneously. A new retrofit, however, eliminated this difficulty,  which was felt to be a basic design deficiency.

SHOCK was thus entirely lifelike in every way. It scared the hell out of  Profane the first time he saw it, lying half out the smashed windshield of  an old Plymouth, fitted with moulages for depressed-skull and jaw injuries  and compound arm and leg fractures. But now he'd got used to it. The only  thing at Anthroresearch that still fazed him a little was SHROUD, whose face  was a human skull that looked at you through a more-or-less abstracted  butyrate head.

It was time to make another round. The building was empty except for  Profane. No experiments tonight. On the way back to the guardroom he stopped  in front of SHROUD.

"What's it like," he said.

Better than you have it.

"Wha."

Wha yourself. Me and SHOCK are what you and everybody will be someday. (The  skull seemed to be grinning at Profane.)

"There are other ways besides fallout and road accidents."

But those are most likely. If somebody else doesn't do it to you, you'll do  it to yourselves.

"You don't even have a soul. How can you talk."

Since when did you ever have one? What are you doing, getting religion? All  I am is a dry run. They take readings off my dosimeters. Who is to say  whether I'm here so the people can read the meters or whether the radiation  in me is because they have to measure. Which way does it go?

"it's one way," said Profane. "All one way."

Mazel tov. (Maybe the hint of a smile?)

Somehow Profane had difficulty getting back in the plot of Existentialist  Sheriff. After a while he got up and went over to SHROUD. "What do you mean,  we'll be like you and SHOCK someday? You mean dead?"

Am I dead? If I am then that's what I mean.

"If you aren't then what are you?"

Nearly what you are. None of you have very far to go.

"I don't understand."

So I see. But you're not alone. That's a comfort, isn't it? To hell with it.  Profane went back to the guardroom and busied himself making coffee.

 

III

 The next weekend there was a party at Raoul, Slab and Melvin's. The Whole  Sick Crew was there.

At one in the morning Roony and Pig started a fight.

"Son of a bitch," Roony yelled. "You keep your hands off her."

"His wife," Esther informed Slab. The Crew had withdrawn to the walls,  leaving Pig and Roony most of the floor space. Both were drunk and sweating.  They wrestled around, stumbling and inexpert, trying to fight like a western  movie. It is incredible how many amateur brawlers believe the movie saloon  fight is the only acceptable model to follow. At last Pig dropped Roony with  a fist to the abdomen. Roony just lay there, eyes closed, trying to hold  down his breathing because it hurt. Pig wandered out to the kitchen. The  fight had been over a girl but both of them knew her name was Paola, not  Mafia.

 

"I don't hate the Jewish people," Mafia was explaining, "only the things  they do." She and Profane were alone in her apartment. Roony was out  drinking. Perhaps seeing Eigenvalue. It was the day after the fight. She  didn't seem to care where her husband was.

All at once Profane got a marvelous idea. She wanted to keep Jews out? Maybe  half a Jew could get in.

She beat him to it: her hand reached for his belt buckle and started to  unfasten it.

"No," he said, having changed his mind. Needing a zipper to undo, her hands  slid away, around her hips to the back of her skirt. "Now look."

"I need a man," already half out of the skirt, "fashioned for Heroic Love.  I've wanted you ever since we met."

"Heroic Love's ass," said Profane. "You're married."

Charisma was having nightmares in the next room. He started thumping around  under the green blanket, flailing out at the elusive shadow of his own  Persecutor.

"Here," she said, lower half denuded, "here on the rug."

Profane got up and rooted around in the icebox for beer. Mafia lay on the  floor, screaming at him.

"Here yourself." He set a can of beer on her soft abdomen. She yelped,  knocking it over. The beer made a soggy spot on the rug between them, like a  bundling board or Tristan's blade. "Drink your beer and tell me about Heroic  Love." She was making no move to get dressed.

"A woman wants to feel like a woman," breathing hard, "is all. She wants to  be taken, penetrated, ravished. But more than that she wants to enclose the  man."

With spiderwebs woven of yo-yo string: a net or trap. Profane could think of  nothing but Rachel.

"Nothing heroic about a schlemihl," Profane told her. What was a hero?  Randolph Scott, who could handle a six-gun, horse's reins, lariat. Master of  the inanimate. But a schlemihl, that was hardly a man: somebody who lies  back and takes it from objects, like any passive woman.

"Why," he wondered, "does something like sex have to be so confused. Mafia,  why do you have to have names for it." Here he was arguing again. Like with  Fina in the bathtub.

"What are you," she snarled, "a latent homosexual? You afraid of women?"

"No, I'm not queer." How could you say: sometimes women remind me of  inanimate objects. Young Rachel, even: half an MG.

Charisma came in, two beady eyes peering through burnholes in the blanket.  He spotted Mafia, moved toward her. The green wool mound began to sing:

   It is something less than heaven

   To be quoted Thesis 1.7

   Every time I make an advance;

   If the world is all that the case is

   That's a pretty discouraging basis

   On which to pursue

   Any sort of romance.

   I've got a proposition for you;

   Logical, positive and brief.

   And at least it could serve as a kind of comic relief:

[Refrain]

   Let P equal me,

   With my heart in command;

   Let Q equal you

   With Tractatus in hand;

   And R could stand for a lifetime of love,

   Filled with music to fondle and purr to.

   We'll define love as anything lovely you'd care to infer to.

   On the right, put that bright,

   Hypothetical case;

   On the left, our uncleft,

   Parenthetical chase.

   And that horseshoe there in the middle

   Could be lucky; we've nothing to lose,

   If in these parentheses

   We just mind our little P's

   And Q's.

   If P [Mafia sang in reply] thinks of me

   As a girl hard to make,

   Then Q wishes you

   Would go jump in the lake.

   For R is a meaningless concept,

   Having nothing to do with pleasure:

   I prefer the hard and tangible things I can measure.

   Man, you chase in the face

   Of impossible odds;

   I'm a lass in the class

   Of unbossable broads.

   If you'll promise no more sticky phrases,

   Half a mo while I kick off my shoes.

   There are birds, there are bees,

   And to hell with all your P's

   And Q's.

By the time Profane finished his beer, the blanket covered them both.

 

Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog  days began. The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate.  Fifteen were killed in a train wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico, on 1 July. The  next day fifteen people died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid.  July 4 a bus fell into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers  drowned. Thirty-nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm in  the central Philippines. 9 July the Aegean Islands were hit by an earthquake  and tidal waves, which killed forty-three. 14 July a MATS plane crashed  after takeoff from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, killing forty-five.  An earthquake at Anjar, India, 21 July, killed 117. From 22 to 24 July  floods rampaged in central and southern Iran, killing three hundred. 28 July  a bus ran off a ferryboat at Kuopio, Finland, and fifteen were killed. Four  petroleum tanks blew up near Dumas, Texas, 29 July, killing nineteen. 1  August, seventeen died in a train wreck near Rio de Janeiro. Fifteen more  died the 4th and 5th, in floods in southwest Pennsylvania. 2161 people died  the same week in a typhoon which hit Chekiang, Honan and Hopeh Provinces. 7  August six dynamite trucks blew up in Cali, Colombia, killing about 1100.  The same day there was a train wreck at Prerov, Czechoslovakia, killing  nine. The next day 262 miners, trapped by fire, died in a coal mine under  Marcinelle, in Belgium. Ice avalanches on Mont Blanc swept fifteen mountain  climbers into the kingdom of death in the week 12 to 18 August. The same  week a gas explosion in Monticello, Utah, killed fifteen and a typhoon  through Japan and Okinawa killed thirty. Twenty-nine more coal miners died  of gas poisoning in a mine in Upper Silesia on 27 August. Also on the 27th a  Navy bomber crashed among houses in Sanford, Florida, and killed four. Next  day a gas explosion in Montreal killed seven and flash floods in Turkey  killed 138.

These were the mass deaths. There were also the attendant maimed,  malfunctioning, homeless, lorn. It happens every month in a succession of  encounters between groups of living and a congruent world - which simply  doesn't care. Look in any yearly Almanac, under "Disasters" - which is where  the figures above come from. The business is transacted month after month  after month.

 

IV

 McClintic Sphere had been reading fakebooks all afternoon. "If you ever want  to get depressed," he told Ruby, "read through a fakebook. I don't mean the  music, I mean the words."

The girl didn't answer. She'd been nervous the past couple of weeks. "What  is wrong, baby," he'd say; but she'd shrug it off. One night she told him it  was her father who was bugging her. She missed him. Maybe he was sick.

"You been seeing him? A little girl should do that. You don't know how lucky  you are to have your father."

"He lives in another city," and she wouldn't say any more.

Tonight he said, "Look, you need the fare? You go see him. That's what you  ought to do."

"McClintic," she said, "what business does a whore have going anywhere? A  whore isn't human."

"You are. You are with me, Ruby. You know it; we aren't playing any games  here," patting the bed.

"Whore lives in one place and stays there. Like some little virgin girl in a  fairy tale. She doesn't do any traveling, unless she works the streets."

"You haven't been thinking about that."

"Maybe." She wouldn't look at him.

"Matilda likes you. You crazy?"

"What else is there? Either the street or all cooped up. If I do go see him  I won't come back."

"Where does he live. South Africa?"

"Maybe."

"Oh Christ."

Now, McClintic Sphere told himself, nobody goes and falls in love with a  prostitute. Not unless he's fourteen or so and she's the first piece of tail  he's ever had. But this Ruby, whatever she might be in bed, was a good  friend outside it too. He worried about her. It was (for a change) that good  kind of worry; not, say, like Roony Winsome's, which seemed to bug the man  worse every time McClintic saw him.

It had been going on now for at least a couple of weeks. McClintic, who'd  never gone along all the way with the "cool" outlook that developed in the  postwar years, didn't mind as much as some other musicians might have when  Roony got juiced and started talking about his personal problems. A few  times Rachel had been along with him, and McClintic knew Rachel was  straight, and there wasn't any jazzing going on there, so Roony must have  genuinely had problems with this Mafia woman.

It was moving into deep summer time in Nueva York, the ............