Authors: Lawrence Sanders
“Table or bar, sir?” the pleasant voice asked.
“Bar, please,” a said.
I was gently guided. When I could touch the bar, a swiveling barstool, the warm hand left my arm. I didn’t turn to inspect him. I couldn’t have made him out. What illumination there was in the room came from the weak floods focused on the stage.
“Sir?” a pleasant voice said. In front of me. I peered.
“Dr. Bartender, I presume?” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Natural brandy, please.”
“Yes, sir. Water on the side?”
“Please.”
The pupil is a remarkable organ. After ten minutes I could discern the small snifter of brandy before me on the bar. I could even see, dimly, the bartender who had served me. A luscious lad. There were a few other singles seated at the bar. But most of the members at tables or in booths were couples or parties of four. Very quiet.
Very restrained. No raucousness. Possibly the most genteel frail joint I had ever visited.
The lights pointed at the stage went off. The room was in total darkness. Then the lights came on again. Bright. Blinding. A loudspeaker clicked on.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the management of your Adonis Club is proud to present, by popular demand, a return engagement of that exciting star performer—
Tex!"
Curtains parted. To the recorded strains of Brahms’ “The Rose Breaks Into Bloom,” a tall, muscular em clumped onto the minuscule stage. He was wearing the black leather costume of a motorcyclist. Complete with tinted bubble helmet that concealed hair and features. The tight jacket, pants, heavy boots seemed to have a hundred zippers, a thousand metal studs. The zippers were languorously slid open, in approximate time to the music. As the audience sucked its breath. Nothing better being available at that point in time.
Brahms seemed to repeat three times. Eventually, the strip-biker was down to tight bikini panties and that opaque helmet. Striding the dusty stage on bare feet. The corpus was that of a weight lifter: enormously developed deltoids, biceps, quadriceps. Attractive Roman fold about the pelvis. As I should have anticipated, the buttocks were extraordinary. Peachy. When he finally removed the panties and stood naked (except for that concealing helmet), his family jewels proved to be rhinestones. No matter; the audience approved. There was a frantic snapping of fingers. He took six curtains calls. On the final call, he removed his helmet. That was a mistake.
I turned back to my empty brandy glass and signaled for a refill.
“Have one with me?” I asked the bartender.
“Sorry, sir,” he said. “We’re not allowed to drink with members of the club.”
“Have one with me?” I repeated.
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
He mixed something swiftly behind the bar. Raised the glass briefly to me, in thanks, drank, then lowered the glass out of sight. In that darkness, even I, closest to him, could hardly see what he was doing.
“Arthur Raddo,” I said. “Did you know him?”
“Who?” he said.
I reached across the bar to clasp his hand. And transfer a ten.
“Arthur Raddo,” I said. Wriggling my hand free. “Did you know him? Artie? Ever see him?”
“Artie,” he said. “Wasn’t that a shame?”
“Yes,” I said. “A shame. A tragedy.”
He liked the word.
“A tragedy,” he repeated. “Yes, it was a tragedy.”
“He came in here often?”
“Oh ... not often. Once, twice a week. Like that.”
“With anyone?”
“Not at the bar. No. He came to the bar by himself. Up to a few months ago.”
“And then?”
“He came with a friend. They sat at a table. I wouldn’t know about that.”
I sighed. I was running out of tens. So I gave him two fives. “Ask, will you?” I urged. “Any waiter who might have served him. Artie’s friend’s name, and what he looked like. The friend, I mean. What the friend looked like. Can you do that for me?” “Well . . .” he said doubtfully. “I’ll try.”
“Do,” I said.
“You’re so sweet,” he said.
I sipped my brandy while he was gone. Trying to make out my own features in the artificially antiqued mirror behind the bar. My face was wrinkled with wavering tendrils of gilt. Guilt? Who was I? I couldn’t make me out.
“Yes,” a voice said. And there he was again. Looming close to me out of the gloom. “Artie came in several times with a friend. Not
with
a friend. He met him here.”
“Name?” I asked.
“Artie called him Nick.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Did you ask what he looked like? This friend of Artie’s?”
“About your height,” the bartender said. “About your weight and build. With hair about your shade.”
“And with a mustache,’’I said. “And a Vandyke beard. Just like mine.”
“Exactly,” he said. “How did you know?”
“Thank you very much,” I said.
“I adore you,” he said.
I went reeling out of there. Remembering an experience I had at MIT when I was being conditioned on computer technology. There had been a power lapse—not a failure out a lapse—and the computer I was serving on had run wild. It had spewed out incredible nonsense until we brought it back to norm. While it was out of control, the readout screen had scanned: “Bicycle boys never into tile sky shall.” That was precisely my mood at that point in time: “Bicycle boys never into tile sky shall.”
But it was to be compounded. I departed that dungeon and wandered back to my car. Not computing at all. Not at all. Toward me, on the crowded sidewalk, came lurching a very tall em. Apparently drunk. Picking his nose thoughtfully.
And wearing a checkered cap.
Opening remarks delivered at a conversazione of scientists of various disciplines, University of California at Berkeley, July 16, 1999:
“It can hardly come as a surprise to most of you here tonight that, for the past fifteen years, the foreign policy of the US Government has been based on our agricultural production. Particularly of cereal grains. This agriwar, in which admittedly we have used food as an aggressive weapon, has reduced the danger of nukewar to an irre-min. For which I think we all, regardless of our political tilt, can be thankful.
‘ ‘Wait—wait just a minute! I do not want this colloquy to degrade into a debate on morality. Since when has morality been a scientific discipline? I’ll say only that, having spent most of my adult life in Public Service, I know it is a fatal error to confuse personal morality with political morality. The two, I assure you, have nothing in common.
“But the thesis I wish to propose to you tonight—and which I hope will be the subject of frank and lively discussion—is that the period in which the superiority of the US in agriwar was the base of our foreign policy and national security is drawing to a close. The production of protein from petroleum, the improved strains of natural grains, the development of protein from plankton, the exciting discoveries in the area of weather control, the increasing use of soybeans in the production of synthetic foods, factory farms, hydroponic gardens: all these, plus the worldwide gains in achieving Z-Pop, have reduced the importance of food as a weapon of foreign policy.
““What I suggest to you now is that it is time to consider a new basis for our national strength. The Twenty-first will, in my opinion, be the Century of Sciwar. And unless we immediately establish the proposed Department ef Creative Science, bringing scientists of all disciplines into policymaking roles in the US Government, we are doomed to become a second-rate power.”
That was the last meeting of my final Public Relations tour on behalf of the DCS. I flew directly from San Francisco to Detroit on an official courier plane. Hypersonic operations had once again been approved for the Detroit area.
I was exhausted. Throat raspy. Unable to compute clearly all the problems that beset me. I suffered three attacks of RSC in California. Of increasing severity. During the last, I remembered a stuffed giraffe I had played with as an infant. I couldn’t have been much more than one year old at the time. It was, by far, my most ancient memory. If I went back any farther, I’d recall swimming lazily in my mother’s womb.
I arrived at our Grosse Pointe place in time to have lunch with my father. Just before he departed for a week’s tour of his overseas factories.
"Nick-ol ’ -as! ” he shouted. I submitted to the expected bear hug.
He brought me up to tick. The Die-Dee Doll was a tremendous success. Worldwide markets. Eighteen ethnic models. Forty-seven national costumes. Love pouring in. Demand increasing. The problem was production. Not in raw material shortfalls, but in assembly. And just when he was convinced the problem was insoluble, along comes that little butterfly Paul Bumford with a request that he cooperate in a field test of a new drug that might double his production norms.
“Nick, did you know about that?” my father demanded.
I told him yes, I knew all about that.
And did I think it would really serve? Would it raise his unit assembly rate?
“I think it will,” I said.
“That’s good enough for me,” he burbled. “I’ll flash Paul ago. That’s one bright em. I misjudged him. I admit it. What is this stuff, Nick?” “An injection,” I said. “Self-administered.”
“What does it do? Make ’em serve faster?”
“No,” I said. “No recorded effect on muscular coordination, physical speed, or anything like that. It’s a reward for increased production. That’s all I can tell you.”
“A reward?” he said. “Better than overtime love?”
“Much better,” I assured him. “And much cheaper.”
“That’s for me.” He laughed. “But we’ll have to make it voluntary. You know that, don’t you, Nick? The unions will insist on it.”
“Of course.”
“Paul knows it?”
"I’m sure he does. We’ll get Informed Consent Statements from everyone injected.”
“You think they’ll go for it? The servers?”
“When the word gets around, they’ll be lining up for shots.” “Wonderful!” he yelled.
“Yes,” I said. “Wonderful.”
I stood on the porch. Waving as my father’s helicopter lifted off the front lawn. He hadn’t married the musician. I didn’t think he would. But his new black ef copter pilot seemed to be about two meters tall. With a corpus as pliant as whalebone. Green hair down to her arse. My father’s vitality depressed me.
I slept ten hours. Breakfasted voraciously on orange petrojuice, proham, powdered eggs, propots, two slices of soybread, and three cups of coftea. I spent four hours playing cartel bridge with Mrs. McPherson, Miss Catherine, and Charles. Then went back to bed for another eight hours. I awoke convinced that I would find solutions for all my problems and never again see another checkered cap. I called Millie Jean Grunwald.
It was then almost 2400. I woke her up, I knew, but I had never known her to speak to me in anger, or even pique. She seemed delighted when she recognized my voice. I think she was. She told me to hurry; she had so much to tell me.
I hadn’t brought her a gift. But I went up to what had been my mother’s bedroom, and on the top shelf of a closet, wrapped in pink tissue paper, I found an obso French doll. One of those long-legged, long-armed, fancily dressed, floppy figures young efs once left sprawled on their counterpanes.
Into Detroit, in the antique Ford Capri. To Millie’s darkened street. The deserted porn shop. But her lights were on. She awaited me.
As I had hoped, the French doll delighted her. Millie would never be allowed to breed, not with her genetic rating, and perhaps she knew it. Or sensed it. She adopted the doll as her very own immediately. Insisted on taking it into bed with us. Perched high on a pillow, its painted lips smiled down on our naked corpora. Eyes opened wide in enthralled astonishment.
Millie had gained at least ten kilos since I had last seen her. Too much Qik-Freez Hot-Qizine at her factory’s cafeteria. She had scarcely any waist left. The breasts were fuller, and buttocks, thighs, calves. Even upper arms and feet. I didn’t care. All of her was soft. That young, globular ass was particularly comforting. Her flesh had a fresh, infant’s scent. She tasted of warm milk.
I had intended only to hold her. Listening to her long, involved accounts of what had happened to her supervisor’s husband, how her girlfriend’s boyfriend had betrayed her, and what a local florist had suggested to her (Millie): a free natural philodendron for a fast blowjob in the stockroom.
But there was so much of her. Her almost matronly breasts hardened under my negligent urging. Long nipples stared at me expectantly. Plump thighs parted. Knees raised and widened. The lower mouth yawned. In all conscience, could I reject her when she was already humid? And panting? And I was already humid? And panting?
I maneuvered her to hands and knees. Then pressed her head and shoulders gently downward. Until her face was turned sideways onto a pillow. Live hair flung out. Great hips and buttocks raised to me. Sleek and round. She reached up to pull the French doll down to her. Cuddled it. Kissed its pouting lips. Stroked its long, tight sausage curls. Crooned into its little ear.
She was conscious of me on a physical level. The slow writhing of her pelvis demonstrated that. But as her corpus quickened, den became lubricious, ass heatened and tautened in my grip, she never left off crooning to the doll. Whispering into its tiny ear as I, insensate, thrust. Both of us slaves.Both of us masters. I didn’t know.
I do know that when I felt the onset of orgasm, could no longer restrain, I withdrew and directed jets of hot semen onto her soft buttocks and dimpled back. Watching the birdlime drip and run.
Wondering why I was doing what I was doing to this child. And she smiled, smiled, nodded, nodded, and whispered secrets into the ear of my mother’s doll.
Hours later—one or several; I wasn’t aware—she shook me awake. Frantic. She had switched on the bedlamp.
“Nick,” she said, “wake up. Please wake up, Nick.”
“What is it?” I said.
“Listen,” she said.
I listened. A squeaking. Clicking. Sudden scamper.
“Mice in the walls,” I told her. “Coming up from the basement. Try to forget them. Go back to sleep.”
“I saw one last week,” she said. ‘‘It ran across the floor and went down a hole where the pipe is. There in the corner.”