“I’m glad you can focus your anger so well,” Dial-a-Psych said.
“Oh, I know my angers pretty well!”
“Can you think of a positive activity, to refocus your mind in that direction?”
“You bet! I’m going on a date tonight with a wonderful woman! She’s finally agreed to go out with me!”
“Wonderful! Have a good time!”
“Thanks! I will!”
He hung up, a little relieved, even if he never felt entirely satisfied with these thirty-second sessions via telephone.
He checked his watch. He just had time to get ready. He threw his clothes into the washer, tossing in baking soda since he knew that worked in a pinch. He showered, brushed his teeth, and then worked up a new sweat pacing in front of the drying machine as his clothes tumbled at their leisure. When they were ready, he dressed and admired himself in the mirror. He cut a dashing figure—a humbly dashing figure, admittedly, but a dashing figure nonetheless.
No sooner had he finished then the doorbell rang. He ran to answer.
When he threw open the door, he gasped.
“Hi,” she said cheerfully. Gloria stood there, dressed perfectly in modest but chic fashion, with newly styled hair sweeping back from her appealing face. It was her, and yet—“You’re Gloria,” he said. “But at the same time you aren’t.”
“Well, that’s true.” She smiled shyly. “May I come in?”
“But wait a minute. What about you isn’t Gloria?”
She looked at him with a tilted head, as if deciding whether to reveal a secret.
She decided in the positive. “Max,” she said. “This isn’t the real Gloria, actually. I’m just like Gloria, down to nearly all her memories—but I’m her surrogate. I’m her Comfy-Clone, Date-a-Fake Gloria. You see, this way I can go on a date with you at no risk to the real Gloria. How many heartbreaks and misunderstandings have arisen because of too-high expectations on the first date—or of broken illusions after the first date? This way, Gloria can rerun my memory tapes of our date at her leisure, and can decide on the basis of my experience whether she wants to continue the relationship or call it off—and all this at no inconvenience to her.” The surrogate Gloria smiled. “Since I have all the personality and memories of the real Gloria, by going on a date with me you get the full experience of dating her, just as if she were really here. Isn’t it wonderful? Now may I come in, Max?”
“I’m not sure I like this.”
“Well, if you’d feel more comfortable, I could just go out with your Date-a-Fake—”
He slammed the door, and stood staring at its blank surface in disbelief.
Not Gloria—
Not the Gloria he’d spoken with, now and then, and had gotten to know a little in high school, and had just met again after they’d both returned from college—
Not her. It couldn’t be her doing this! Gloria having a Date-a-Fake? She was too honest a person, too open, too real to submit to this world of substitutes!
Yet she had. The evidence stood outside his door.
The evidence, in fact, rang the doorbell and then knocked, and rang again.
Making sure it was locked, Max left the door and headed for the living room. He had nowhere to turn. He could order a six-pack of beer, and get drunk—but would it be real beer? Would it just be factory made—would they even have aged it, or would they have substituted some other process to replace the aging? And would he get real drunk if he drank the whole six-pack—or would it be a made-up drunk, caused by drunkenness-simulating chemicals in the drink?
He probably even lacked the option of suicide. He could probably only do it artificially. He might think he was slitting his wrist or swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills or hanging himself, but someone, somehow, would have arranged that he be swept into some artificial heaven, just to make sure he thought he was killing himself—so that he would be distanced from his own death, for heaven’s sake! He almost cried out at the thought. Nothing would remain possible, then! While he valued only real things, the whole world had moved away: he’d been standing still, living his old life in the old ways, just as usual! Here, in his house, he stood alone while the rest of humanity rushed down the road, eagerly in pursuit of their once-removed, artificially real-feeling lives! What if his mother on the phone today had only been her answering service, a metal box imbued with her crankiness and voice! Inconceivable—and yet, if Gloria could—
And if even his mother and Gloria had given in to this idiotic wave of the plastic and the electronic, of the once-removed and the permanently removed, then what did the world have left to offer him?
The phone rang.
Warily he picked it up. “Hello?”
“Max?”
“Hi, mom.”
“I was wondering if you were feeling all right. You sounded a little piqued this afternoon.”
“The phone company—”
“I was going to talk to you about that, Max. Why are you using phones when they’re so old hat? Get on top of things, boy! How do you expect to move ahead in this world when you’re going backward? Things are happening! You could be hooked by computer voice-links and wrist-boards so you wouldn’t even need a telephone, and here you are worrying about those Neanderthals at the phone company!”
“Sure, mom, but—”
“But what you should be worried about, at your age, Max, is finding yourself a nice young woman. Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Max? Do you realize how old you are?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. And—”
“Good. Now see that you do something about it.”
“About my age?”
“Smart aleck! That’s my boy! I show a little motherly concern and what does he do, he gets smart! Take my advice, Max. Apply a little gumption to your rumption, and get a move on. The world’s going to move with or without you. I tell you this with all my mother’s love, Max.”
She hung up.
“Love you too, mom.”
He flopped onto the couch. Was he getting riled up about nothing? Did it matter if something was or was not the real thing? What was the real thing, anyway? What about money?
He took the bills out of his pocket. A century ago, people would have complained that the bills were anything but real, being nothing more than promissory notes. And coins, even if metal, were made of minerals with about the value of paper.
That word—“currency”—made a strange sense. A medium of exchange, to be acceptable, needed no intrinsic value. It only had to partake in the current framework of exchange, whether it was a matter of bartering, exchanging gold for bank notes, or giving and taking credit. Just because gold was more massive than a plastic card, did that make a gold transaction materially more substantial than a credit transaction? Which was real, after alclass="underline" the gold, or the transaction? Maybe the cashier, Julie, had been right, in a stubbornly latest-thing-only way, to reject cash. She would have rejected pure gold or silver, after all. She would even have rejected outmoded gold or silver certificates. The bills he had offered her, while still widely acceptable, were simply old-fashioned—and therefore inconvenient—and therefore of reduced value in relation to the one real thing involved: the transaction.