Is That What People Do? (17 page)

“Oh, I don’t know. You have to find the right one,” the robot would reply dutifully, repeating what had been put on its tape.

“I never saw a good one yet,” Mark would say.

“Well, that’s not fair. Perhaps you didn’t look long enough. There’s a girl in the world for every man.”

“You’re a romantic!” Mark would say scornfully. The robot would pause—a built-in pause—and chuckle a carefully constructed chuckle.

“I dreamed of a girl named Martha once,” Charles would say. “Maybe if I’d looked, I would have found her.”

And then it would be bedtime. Or perhaps Mark would want more conversation. “What do you think of girls?” he would ask again, and the discussion would follow its same course.

Charles grew old. His limbs lost their flexibility, and some of his wiring started to corrode. Mark would spend hours keeping the robot in repair.

“You’re getting rusty,” he would cackle.

“You’re not so young yourself,” Charles would reply. He had an answer for almost everything. Nothing elaborate, but an answer.

It was always night on Martha, but Mark broke up his time into mornings, afternoons, and evenings. Their life followed a simple routine. Breakfast, from vegetables and Mark’s canned store. Then the robot would work in the fields, and the plants grew used to his touch. Mark would repair the pump, check the water supply, and straighten up the immaculate shack. Lunch, and the robot’s chores were usually finished.

The two would sit on the packing case and watch the stars. They would talk until supper, and sometimes late into the endless night.

In time, Mark built more complicated conversations into Charles. He couldn’t give the robot free choice, of course, but he managed a pretty close approximation of it. Slowly, Charles’ personality emerged. But it was strikingly different from Mark’s.

Where Mark was querulous, Charles was calm. Mark was sardonic, Charles was naive. Mark was a cynic, Charles was an idealist. Mark was often sad; Charles was forever content.

And in time, Mark forgot he had built the answers into Charles. He accepted the robot as a friend, of about his own age. A friend of long years’ standing.

“The thing I don’t understand,” Mark would say, “is why a man like you wants to live here. I mean, it’s all right for me. No one cares about me, and I never gave much of a damn about anyone. But why you?”

“Here I have a whole world,” Charles would reply, “where on Earth I had to share with billions. I have the stars, bigger and brighter than on Earth. I have all space around me, close, like still waters. And I have you, Mark.”

“Now, don’t go getting sentimental on me—”

“I’m not. Friendship counts. Love was lost long ago, Mark. The love of a girl named Martha, whom neither of us ever met. And that’s a pity. But friendship remains, and the eternal night.”

“You’re a bloody poet,” Mark would say, half admiringly.

“A poor poet.”

Time passed unnoticed by the stars, and the air pump hissed and clanked and leaked. Mark was fixing it constantly, but the air of Martha became increasingly rare. Although Charles labored in the fields, the crops, deprived of sufficient air, died.

Mark was tired now, and barely able to crawl around, even without the grip of gravity. He stayed in his bunk most of the time. Charles fed him as best as he could, moving on rusty, creaky limbs.

“What do you think of girls?”

“I never saw a good one yet.”

“Well, that’s not fair.”

Mark was too tired to see the end coming, and Charles wasn’t interested. But the end was on its way. The air pump threatened to give out momentarily. There hadn’t been any food for days.

“But why you?”

“Here I have a whole world—”

“Don’t get sentimental—”

“And the love of a girl named Martha.”

From his bunk Mark saw the stars for the last time. Big, bigger than ever, endlessly floating in the still waters of space.

“The stars...” Mark said.

“Yes?”

“The sun?”

“—shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore.”

“A bloody poet.”

“A poor poet”

“And girls?”

“I dreamed of a girl named Martha once. Maybe if—”

“What do you think of girls? And stars? And Earth?” And it was bedtime, this time forever.

Charles stood beside the body of his friend. He felt for a pulse once, and allowed the withered hand to fall. He walked to a corner of the shack and turned off the tired air pump.

The tape that Mark had prepared had a few cracked inches left to run. “I hope he finds his Martha,” the robot croaked.

Then the tape broke.

His rusted limbs would not bend, and he stood frozen, staring back at the naked stars. Then he bowed his head.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” Charles said. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me...”

SILVERSMITH WISHES

The stranger lifted his glass. “May your conclusions always flow sweetly from your premises.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Nelson Silversmith.

Solemnly they both sipped Orange Julius. Outside the flotsam of 8th Street flowed eastward, to circulate with sluggish restlessness in the Sargasso of Washington Square. Silversmith munched his chili dog.

The stranger said, “I suppose you think I’m some kind of a nut.”

Silversmith shrugged. “I assume nothing.”

“Well spoken,” the stranger said. “My name is Terence Maginnis. Come have a drink with me.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Silversmith said.

Some twenty minutes later they were seated on torn red plastic benches in Joe Mangeri’s Clam Bar and Beer Parlor, exchanging fragments of discursive philosophy as casual strangers meeting in New York’s Greenwich Village on a slow mild October afternoon will do. Maginnis was a short compact red-faced man with emphatic gestures and a fuzzy Harris tweed suit. Silversmith was a lanky thirty-two-year-old with a mournful face and long tapering fingers.

“So look,” Maginnis said abruptly, “enough small talk. I have a proposition to put to you.”

“So put,” Silversmith said, with aplomb. Not for nothing had he been brought up in the bewildering social complexities of Bayonne, New Jersey.

“It is this,” Maginnis said. “I am a front man for a certain organization which must remain nameless. We have a free introductory offer. We give you, absolutely free and without obligation, three requests. You may ask for any three things, and I will get them for you if it is within my power.”

“And what do I do in return?” Silversmith asked.

“Nothing whatsoever. You just sit back and take.”

“Three requests,” Silversmith said thoughtfully. “Do you mean three wishes?”

“Yes, you could call it that.”

“A person who grants wishes is a fairy.”

“I am not a fairy,” Maginnis said firmly.

“But you do grant wishes?”

“Yes. I am a normal person who grants wishes.”

“And I,” Silversmith said, “am a normal person who makes wishes. So, for my first wish, I would like a really good hi-fi with quad speakers, tape deck, and all the rest.”

“You are a cool one,” Maginnis said.

“Did you expect me to portray astonishment’”

“I expected dubiety, anxiety, resistance. People generally look with suspicion on a proposition like mine.”

“The only thing I learned at NYU,” Silversmith said, “was the willing suspension of disbelief. Don’t you get many takers?”

“You’re my first in a long time. People simply don’t believe it can be on the level.”

“Incredulity is not an appropriate attitude in this age of Heisenbergian physics. Ever since I read in
Scientific American
that a positron is nothing more than an electron traveling backwards in time, I have had no difficulty believing anything at all.”

“I must remember to put that into my sales pitch,” Maginnis said. “Now give me your address. You’ll be hearing from me.”

Three days later Maginnis came to Silversmith’s fifth-floor walkup on Perry Street. He was lugging a large packing case and perspiring freely. His tweed suit smelled like an overworked camel.

“What a day!” he said. “I’ve been all over Long Island City looking for just the right rig. Where shall I put it?”

“Right there is fine,” Silversmith said. “What about the tape deck?”

“I’m bringing it this afternoon. Have you thought about your second wish yet?”

“A Ferrari. A red one.”

“To hear is to obey,” Maginnis said. “Doesn’t all this strike you as rather fantastic?”

“Phenomenology takes these matters into account,” Silversmith said. “Or, as the Buddhists say, ‘The world is of a suchness.’ Can you get me a recent model?”

“I think I can put my hands on a new one,” Maginnis said. “With supercharger and genuine walnut dashboard.”

“Now you’re beginning to astonish me,” Silversmith said. “But where’ll I park it?”

“That’s your problem,” Maginnis said. “Catch you later.”

Silversmith waved absentmindedly and began to open the packing case.

Next Maginnis found him a spacious rent-controlled triplex on Patchin Place for $102.78 a month including utilities. With it, Maginnis gave Silversmith five bonus wishes.

“You can really do that
⁵
” Silversmith asked. “You won’t get into trouble with your company?”

“Don’t worry about that. You know, you’re a really good wisher. Your tastes are rich but not outrageous; challenging, but not incredible. Some people really abuse the privilege—demand palaces and slaves and harems filled with Miss America runner-ups.”

“I suppose that sort of thing is out of the question,” Silversmith remarked casually.

“No, I can come up with it. But it just makes trouble for the wisher. You give some slob a replica of the Czar’s summer palace on a ten-acre site in Rhinebeck, New York, and the next thing you know the tax people are buzzing around him like a holocaust of locusts. The guy usually has difficulty explaining how he managed to save up for this palace on the $125 a week he earns as a junior Comtometer operator, so the IRS makes its own assumptions.”

“Which are?”

“That he’s a top Mafia buttonman who knows where Judge Crater is buried.”

“They can’t prove anything, though.”

“Maybe not. But who wants to spend the rest of his life starring in FBI home movies?”

“Not a pleasing prospect for a lover of privacy,” Silversmith said, and revised certain of his plans.

“You’ve been a good customer,” Maginnis said, two weeks later. “Today you get a bonus, and it’s absolutely free. You get a forty-foot Chris-Craft, fully equipped. Where do you want it?”

“Just moor it at the dock of my Nassau place,” Silversmith said. “Oh, and thanks.”

“Another free gift,” Maginnis said, three days after that. “Ten additional wishes, no strings attached.”

“That makes eighteen unused wishes to date,” Silversmith said. “Maybe you should give some to another deserving customer.”

“Don’t be silly,” Maginnis said. “We’re very pleased with you.”

Silversmith fingered his brocade scarf and said, “There
is
a catch, isn’t there?”

It was one month and fourteen wishes later. Silversmith and Maginnis were seated in lawn chairs on the broad lawn of Silversmith’s estate at Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. A string quartet was playing softly in the background. Silversmith was sipping a Negroni. Maginnis, looking more harried than usual, was gulping a whiskey and soda.

“Well, you could call it a catch,” Maginnis admitted. “But it’s not what you think.”

“What is it?”

“You know that I can’t tell you that.”

“Do I maybe end up losing my soul to you and going to hell?”

Maginnis burst into rude laughter. “That,” he said, “is just about the last thing you have to worry about. Excuse me now. I’ve got an appointment in Damascus to see about that Arabian stallion you wanted. You get five more bonus wishes this week, by the way.”

Two months later, after dismissing the dancing girls, Silversmith lay alone in his emperor-sized bed in his eighteen-room apartment on the Pincio in Rome and thought sour thoughts. He had twenty-seven wishes coming to him and he couldn’t think of a thing to wish for. And furthermore, he was not happy.

Silversmith sighed and reached for the glass that was always on his night table filled with seltzer flown in from Grossinger’s The glass was empty.

“Ten servants and they can’t keep a lousy glass filled,” he muttered. He got out of bed, walked across the room and pushed the servant’s button. Then he got back in bed. It took three minutes and thirty-eight seconds by his Rolex Oyster, whose case was carved out of a single block of amber, for the butler’s second assistant to hurry into the room.

Silversmith pointed at the glass. The assistant butler’s eyes bugged out and his jaw fell. “Empty!” he cried. “But I specifically told the maid’s assistant—”

“To hell with the excuses,” Silversmith said. “Some people are going to have to get on the ball around here or some heads are going to roll.”

“Yes,
sir!”
said the butler’s second assistant. He hurried to the built-in wall refrigerator beside Silversmith’s bed, opened it and took out a bottle of seltzer. He put the bottle on a tray, took out a snowy linen towel, folded it once lengthwise and hung it over his arm. He selected a chilled glass from the refrigerator, examined it for cleanliness, substituted another glass and wiped the rim with his towel.

“Get on with it, get
on
with it,” Silversmith said ominously.

The butler’s second assistant quickly wrapped the towel around the seltzer bottle, and squirted seltzer into the glass so exquisitely that he didn’t spill a drop. He replaced the bottle in the refrigerator and handed the glass to Silversmith. Total elapsed time, twelve minutes, forty-three seconds.

Silversmith lay in bed sipping seltzer and thinking deep brooding thoughts about the impossibility of happiness and the elusiveness of satisfaction. Despite having the world’s luxuries spread before him—or because of it—he was bored and had been for weeks. It seemed damned unfair to him, to be able to get anything you wanted, but to be unable to enjoy what you could get.

When you came right down to it, life was a disappointment, and the best it had to offer was never quite good enough. The roast duck was never as crisp as advertised, and the water in the swimming pool was always a shade too warm or too cold.