“What’s the new idea?”
“It’s been under our nose, so close we couldn’t see it for looking. You’ll kick yourself for asking.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“We simply change cycles, Tom.”
“Change cycles.”
“Sure, from menstrual to estrus. Look, Tom—”
“Yes?”
He rattles off the answer like a talk-show guest who’s used to the question. “You know and I know the difference between a woman’s cycle and most of female mammals’.”
“Yes.”
“The human female can conceive during twenty of the twenty-eight days of her cycle. Any other female mammal can only conceive during estrus — say, eight days out of a hundred and eighty.”
“So?”
“As I like to say, our sister Homo saps, God bless them, are in heat seventy-five percent of the time, and what I say is hurray for them and hurray for us. But any other lady mammal is in heat, say, nine percent of the time. Tom, the numbers tell the story. All you have to do with the hypothalamus is lack it into the estrus cycle and you’ve got a marvelous built-in natural population control. Then it’s merely a matter of controlling a few days of estrus — hell, all you have to do is add one dose of progesterone twice a year to the school cafeteria diet and that’s the end of it — goodbye hassles, goodbye pills, rubbers, your friendly abortionist. Goodbye promiscuity, goodbye sex ed — who needs it? Mom and Dad love it, the kids love it, and the state saves millions. Family life is improved, Tom.”
“You mean you’ve tried it?”
“In one junior high school in Baton Rouge, five hundred black girls, year before last forty percent knocked up by age thirteen, last year one girl pregnant — one girl! — and why? because her mamma was packing her lunch box and she missed her progesterone during estrus. And, Tom, get this: a one hundred percent improvement in ACT scores in computation and memory recall in these very subjects.”
“How about language?”
“Language?”
“You know, reading and writing. Like reading a book. Like writing a sentence.”
“You son of a gun.” Bob gives me another poke. “You don’t miss much, do you? You’re quite right. And for a good reason, as you must also know. We’re in a different age of communication — out of McGuffey Readers and writing a theme on ‘what I did last summer.’ Tom, these kids are way past comic books and Star Wars. They’re into graphic and binary communication — which after all is a lot more accurate than once upon a time there lived a wicked queen.”
“You mean they use two-word sentences.”
“You got it. And using a two-word sentence, you know what you can get out of them?”
“What?”
“They can rattle off the total exports and imports of the port of Baton Rouge — like a spread sheet — or give ’em pencil and paper and they’ll give you a graphic of the tributaries of the Red River.”
“How about the drop in crime and unemployment?”
Bob smiles radiantly. “Tom, would you laugh at me if I told you what we’ve done is restore the best of the Southern Way of Life? Would you think that too corny?”
“Well—”
“Well, never mind. Just the facts, ma’am. Here are the facts: Instead of a thousand young punks hanging around the streets in northwest Baton Rouge, looking for trouble, stoned out, ready to mug you, break into your house, rape your daughter, packed off to Angola where they cost you twenty-five thousand a year, do you want to know what they’re doing? Doing not because somebody forces them — we ain’t talking Simon Legree here, boss — but doing of their own accord?”
“What?”
“Cottage industries, garden plots, but mainly apprenticeships.”
“Apprenticeships?”
“Plumber’s helpers, mechanic’s helpers, gardeners, cook’s helpers, waiters, handymen, fishermen — Tom, Baton Rouge is the only city in the U.S. where young blacks are outperforming the Vietnamese and Hispanics.”
“You’re not talking about vo-tech training.”
“I’m talking apprenticeship. What would you do if you’re running an Exxon station and a young man or woman shows up and makes himself useful for gratis, keeps the place clean, is obviously honest and industrious and willing. I’ll tell you what you’d do, because I know. You’d hire him. You want to know what we’re talking about?”
“What?”
“We’re not talking about old massa and his niggers. We’re not talking about Uncle Tom. We’re talking about Uncle Tom Jefferson and his yeoman farmer and yeoman craftsman. You wouldn’t believe what they can do with half an acre of no good batture land. And look at this.” He shows me the key chain of the Mercedes. It is made of finely wrought wooden links. “Carved from one piece of driftwood.”
“Very nice.”
“Nice! You try to do it! And, Tom—”
“Yes?”
“Have you driven by the old project in Baton Rouge lately?”
“No.”
“Well, you know what they were like — monuments of bare ugliness, excrement in the stairwells, and God knows what. You know what you’d see now?”
“No.”
“Green! Trees, shrubs, flowers, garden plots — one of the anthropologists on our board noted a striking resemblance to the decorative vegetation of the Masai tribesmen — and guess what they’ve done with the old cinder-block entrances?”
“What?”
“They’re now mosaics, bits of colored glass from Anacin bottles, taillights, whatever, for all the world like — can’t you guess?”
“No.”
“The African bower bird, Tom. Lovely!”
“I see.”
“Do you remember the colorful bottle trees darkies used to make in the old days?”
“Yes,” I say, wondering how Bob Como of Long Island City knows about bottle trees.
“We got some in the Desire project. Yes, Blue Boy’s there.”
“I see.”
“Would you deny that is superior to the old fuck-you graffiti?”
“No.” I look at my watch. “I’ve got to go home. Two questions.”
“Shoot. Make them hard questions.”
“Are you still disposing of infants and old people in your Qualitarian Centers?”
Bob Comeaux looks reproachful. “That’s unfair, Tom.”
“I didn’t say I disapproved. I was just asking.”
“Ah ha. All right! What you’re talking about is pedeuthanasia and gereuthanasia. What we’re doing, as you well know, is following the laws of the Supreme Court, respecting the rights of the family, the consensus of child psychologists, the rights of the unwanted child not to have to suffer a life of suffering and abuse, the right of the unwanted aged to a life with dignity and a death with dignity. Toward this end we — to use your word — dispose of those neonates and euthanates who are entitled to the Right to Death provision in the recent court decisions.”
“Neonate? Euthanate?”
“I think you’re having me on, Tom. We’ve spoken of this before. But I’ll answer you straight, anyhow. A neonate is a human infant who according to the American Psychological Association does not attain its individuality until the acquisition of language and according to the Supreme Court does not acquire its legal rights until the age of eighteen months — an arbitrary age to be sure, but one which, as you well know, is a good ballpark figure. You of all people know this. Consult your fellow shrinks.”