‘I’d like to try a pilot scheme here, very soon. You gotta admit, Shel, it’s about the cheapest damn therapeutic idea in years, all we have to buy is a couple dozen rubber animal masks. See I was reading Levi-Strauss one day on totems and all at once it hit me, we all need to “be” animals once in a while, to restructure our self-images by new rules… become cats and mice or ducks…’
‘Sure, I see…’
‘…easily recognized signs and codes, I am a pig, to help communicate in a society grown too large and too…’
‘Sure, sure, sure, sure…’
Mary yelped again, the noise just reaching the nurse who was closing a door and pushing past the tree to the phone:
‘Mr Frankstein? Frankline? I’m sorry but he can’t come to the phone right now, he’s urn, he’s urn—’ Her mind filled with movie images of fluttering lights, lightning, the smoking electrodes, the figure on the long table straining, making Galvanic lunges against the straps, the smoking electrodes, hands gripping the arms of the electric chair, tall shadows, the sputtering arch, the baritone hum of electricity, vis vitalis rising on a swell to become a dial tone as she sat, receiver forgotten in her hand, watching the lights on the Christmas tree grow suddenly dim and bright again. Her mouth filled with peppermint bile.
Ben Franklin turned from the phone to his yellow notebook, muttering. ‘No telling what kind of cretins they get to work over there, can’t even work out how to call somebody to the phone.’
‘You said it, buddy,’ said the agent.
Ben twitched the curtain closed and scribbled alone until he slept, waking with a shout in the darkness, soaking wet and shivering as he was again waking in the morning if it was morning, to find himself muttering, ‘Hexcellent, a most hexcellent dancer, your servant ladies and gentlemen…’ And plunged back into that sea of sleep out of which he always seemed to emerge dripping and chilled on the shore of what could hardly be called consciousness.
He was aware of changes: the man with the bandaged head and the self-pitying face in the next bed vanished to be replaced by a salesman of religious novelties who had a noisy TV; he in turn gave way to an old man who kept his teeth in a glass; one morning he was gone but the teeth remained.
An expert on tropical diseases came to look at Ben.
‘Malaria,’ he said. ‘Where have you been travelling?’
‘Only to Taipin.’
‘Try again, there’s no malaria in Taipin. No mosquitoes.’
But they treated him for malaria and he began to improve; one day he sat up and tried to read his notes:
Tolstoi’s ‘Our body is a machine for living’ as a recipe for
French stone. Stones of Deucalion? J. Baptist says God can raise stones up children to Abraham, a pun on children (banim) & stones (abanim) — why always stones or clay in legends as though mineral future reality foreseen, cybern. Kids out of sand?
If we made them would they purge us of the terrible disease of being human?
Can a mind be built from within, by one thought?
‘Everything must be like something, so what is this like?’ — Forster?
Another noisy TV went on, and Ben found himself jerked out of naps by news programmes:
‘…where Machines Lib demonstrators broke into the Digital Love computer dating agency and deprogrammed the computer. Two were arrested, and now Digital Love says it will sue for deprivation of data. Here’s Del Gren on the spot with an up-to-the-minute report. Del?’
The screen showed a ragged line of people in parkas, carrying signs: THIS STORE DEGRADES MACHINES and NO MORE COMPUTER PIMPS. One marcher, a fairly old man with iced-up glasses, paused to shake a mittened fist at the camera. A microphone darted out towards him like a striking snake.
‘Thanks, Mel, these people have been picketing all day. Uh, what is it you’re protesting about, sir?’
‘Well it’s — what do you mean? Machines!’
‘Yes? Just what—?’
‘About the machines! About the unfair, the unfair—’
‘Thanks now if I can just get someone else in on this, you, ma’am?’
A plump woman whose face looked frostbitten came forward, waved her sign and said, ‘We’re against the exploitation of machines! Man if you look at this in the historical context of the last two hundred years it just makes you throw up! Just look how machines get a raw deal all down the line, all the dirty and degrading jobs like rolling steel and pulling trains, not even blacks or women ever had to pull trains.’
‘Yes well thank you this is Del—’
Someone shouted ‘Humanists Go Home!’ and others took up the chant.
‘—Del Gren returning you to Mel?’
‘…fortunate enough to have here in the studio the founder and guiding hand of Machines Lib, Miz Indica Dinks. Hi Indica, and welcome to Minnetonka. Can we get the ball rolling here by finding out just what Machines Lib is all about? What’s the bottom line here?’
‘Hi, Mel, I’m originally from Minnetonka and it’s great to be back. First off let me say that we’re not against people. Far from it! When machines are set free, people will be set free too. In my new book, plug, plug, The Nuts and Bolts of Machines Lib, I explain just how that works out. By the way I’ll be autographing my book next Tuesday at the Vitanuova Shopping Piazza all day.’
‘Fascinating idea, Indica. But what kind of world would it be if all the machines could do what they wanted?’
‘A better world, Mel. A world where a lot of the pressure is off. Just look at now, at our light bills and repair bills and instalments, all the money we pour into just keeping our machines down. But once we ease up and set them free, all that pressure and tension just goes away! Once you stop owning a dishwasher, you can stop paying for it too. Machines Lib means people lib too — and, Mel, that’s what I think America is all about freedom!’
Her beauty pursued Ben. Damn it she looked no older than that day she’d walked out on him to take a job as a dancing taco all those years ago. He remembered her last speech: ‘Ben, I’ll never cut it hanging around a University, I need to fulfil myself. We just, we’re just too different, our worlds are poles apart.’
Now no one ever remembered his part in her life, the questions as now were always about her second husband:
‘Miz Dinks, Indica, how about your ex-husband Hank Dinks? Isn’t he founding a movement of his own? What do you think of his New Luddites?’
‘Yes, he has this little band of fanatics running around wrecking machines. I feel sorry for them, they’re just being self-destructive. To me, America is not about tearing down, it’s about building up. No, Hank and I are just too different. Our worlds are poles apart?
Ben’s phone made a faint sound and he answered it.
‘Mr Franklin? I have a call for you from Mr Kralt, will you hold?’
The perfectly-shaped nail and finger of Mrs McBabbitt pushed two buttons in succession. ‘I have Mr Franklin on the line for you.’
‘Cancel him, Connie, I’m gonna be tied up here a while with Jud Mill.’ The stubby hand with its massive gold ring mounting a pinball pushed buttons to turn off the TV and close a wall panel over the screen, then moved to the cheap cigar smouldering in the ashtray.