He gives the camera a thumbs-up. [Note to Art Dept: Have him offer the camera a handshake. Like our boy Ray is offering America a square deal.]
Bold helvetica across mid-screen:
Samson Guards Your Strength.
Fade to white.
Martin watched his brother. The handsome Thomas. The promising Thomas. The fruitful and multiplying Thomas. 29 million per mil Thomas. Their father (24 million) didn’t even try to fight his joyful tears as he pinned the golden dove on his son’s chest. His good son. His true son. For Thomas the Office in the city. For Thomas the planning and pleasing and roasted chickens and martinis. For Thomas the children as easy as pencil drawings.
For Martin Stone, 2 million per milliliter and most of those dead, a package. In a nice box, to be certain. Irradiated teak. It didn’t matter now anyway. Martin knew without looking what lay nestled in the box. A piece of paper and a bottle. The paper was an ordnance, unknown until he opened the box. It was a lottery. The only way to be fair. It was his ticket.
It might request that he present himself at his local Induction Center at 0900 at the close of the school year. To be shipped out to the Front, which by then might be in Missouri for all anyone knew. He’d suit up and boot it across the twisted, bubbled moonscape of the Sea of Glass. An astronaut. Bouncing on the pulses from Los Alamos to the Pacific. He would never draw again. By Christmas, he wouldn’t have the fine motor skills.
Or it would request just as politely that he arrange for travel to Washington for a battery of civic exams and placement in government service. Fertile men couldn’t think clearly, didn’t you know? All that sperm. Can’t be rational with all that business sloshing around in there. Husbands couldn’t run things. They were needed for more important work. The most important work. Only Brothers could really view things objectively. Big picture men. And women, Sisters, those gorgeous black chip girls with 3-Alpha running cool and sweet in their veins. Martin would probably pull Department of Advertising and Information. Most people did. Other than Defense, it was the biggest sector going. The bottle would be Arcadia. For immediate dosage, and every day for the rest of his life. All sex shall be potentially reproductive. Every girl screwing a Brother is failing to screw a Husband and that just won’t do. They said it tasted like burnt batteries if you didn’t put it in something. The first bottle would be the pure stuff, though. Provided by Halcyon, Your Friend in the Drug Manufacturing Business. Martin would remember it, the copper sear on the roof of his mouth. After that, a whole aisle of choices. Choices, after all, make you who you are. Arcadia or Kool. Brylcreem or Samson.
Don’t worry, Martin. It’s a relief, really. Now you can really get to work. Accomplish something. Carve out your place. Sell the world to the world. You could work your way into the Art Department. Keep drawing babies in carriages. Someone else’s perfect quads, their four faces laughing at you forever from glossy pages.
Suddenly Martin found himself clasped tight in his Father’s arms. Pulling the box out of his boy’s hands, reading the news for him, putting it aside. His voice came as rough as warm gin and Martin could hardly breathe for the strength of his Father’s embrace.
Thomas Walker squeezed his Brother’s hand. Martin did not squeeze back.
Sylvie’s Father was with them that week. He was proud. They bought a chicken from Mrs. Stone and killed it together, as a family. The head popped off like a cork. Sylvie stole glances at him at the table. She could see it now. The chocolate hair. The tallness. Hannah framed her Presentation Scroll and hung it over the fireplace.
Sylvie flushed her Spotless trousseaux down the toilet.
She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it. That’s just the face of it, cookie. A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculum you can play like the spoons. Sylvie wasn’t angry. She was silent. Her life was Mrs. Patterson’s life. People lived in all kinds of messes. She could make rum balls. And treat soil samples and graft cherry varieties and teach some future son or daughter Japanese three weeks a month where no one else could hear. She could look up Bouffant’s friend and buy her a stiff drink. She could enjoy the brief world of solitude and science and birth like red skies dawning. Maybe. She had time.
It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying. It was definitely all shit.
On Sunday she went out to the garage again. Vita-Pops and shadows. Clark slipped in like light through a crack. He had a canister of old war footage under his arm. Stalingrad, Berlin, Ottawa. Yellow shirt with green stripes. Nagasaki and Tokyo, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest. The first retaliation. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Clark reached out and held her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up. It looked like the inside of Sylvie.
“This is my last visit,” Clark said. “School year’s over.” His voice sounded far away, muffled, like he didn’t even know he was talking. “Car’s coming in the morning. Me and Grud are sharing a ride to Induction. I think we get a free lunch.”
Sylvie wanted to scream at him. She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles.
“I love you,” whispered Clark Baker.
On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished.
Sylvie rolled the reel back. They watched it over and over. A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen.
Fade to black.
And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:
Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!
Aeromaus
First: Aerograd has always been occupied. In the grottoes, near the propellers rusted over with moss like verdigris, you might hear someone say otherwise. Crowded around an old gasoline barrel boiling up grey shrimp in oil-slicked water. You might hear someone say anything. Any sophisticated soul can sieve out such obvious lies. The shrimp bob up iridescent, green, purple, blue. I would recommend against eating them. They taste sweet, they taste like life and salt, but your system is not prepared for Aerograd yet. Should you have an allergic reaction to that aspic of petroleum and moss spores, your esophagus will very likely perforate and before your bowels have a chance to put an end to you. We would not like to lose you so soon and by accident.
////⁄: This is a cypher. I do not hold with simple word substitution. I have embedded information also in accent marks, punctuation, the angle of my penmanship on letters e, a, æ, o, h, n, l, and s. Whether or not I use the Oxford comma in a given phrase. Whether or not comma splices occur, prepositions positioned at the end of certain sentences. Under my paragraphs other paragraphs lie, levels up and down, like Aerograd itself. This is a cypher, but everything is a cypher. Everything can be substituted for something else. I believe that.