“I’m listening,” Heather said.
Jason said, “We took the spray can of leg-hair cream out and put a spray can of FDS back in with the same ad copy, which simply read, ‘Demonstrate use of product with expression of contentment and satisfaction,’ and then we got the hell out of there and waited.”
“Did we.”
“Miss Ellar finally showed up, went into her dressing room, opened the paper bag, and then–and this is the part that still makes me break up–she came up to me, perfectly seriously, and said, ‘Mr. Taverner, I’m sorry to bother you about this, but to demonstrate the Feminine Hygiene Deodorant Spray I’ll have to take off my skirt and underpants. Right there before the TV camera.’ ‘So?’ I said. ‘So what’s the problem?’ And Miss Ellar said, ‘I’ll need a little table on which I can put my clothes. I can’t just drop them on the floor; that wouldn’t look right. I mean, I’ll be spraying that stuff into my vagina in front of sixty million people, and when you’re doing that you can’t just leave your clothes lying all around you on the floor; that isn’t elegant.’ She really would have done it, too, right on the air, if Al Bliss hadn’t–”
“It’s a tasteless story.”
“All the same, you thought it was pretty funny. That utterly dumb girl with her first big break ready to do that. ‘Demonstrate use of product with expression of contentment and–‘”
Heather hung up.
How do I make her understand? he asked himself savagely, grinding his teeth together, nearly biting off a silver filling. He hated that sensation: grinding off a piece of filling. Destroying his own body, impotently. Can’t she see that my knowledge of everything about her means something important? he asked himself. Who would know these things? Obviously only someone who had been very close physically with her for some time. There could be no other explanation, and yet she had conjured up such an elaborate other reason that he couldn’t penetrate through to her. And it hung directly in front of her eyes. Her six’s eyes.
Once more he dropped in a coin, dialed.
“Hi again,” he said, when Heather at last picked up the phone in her car. “I know that about you, too,” he said. “You can’t let a phone ring; that’s why you have ten private numbers, each for a different purpose of your very special own.”
“I have three,” Heather said. “So you don’t know everything.”
Jason said, “I merely meant–”
“How much?”
“I’ve had enough of that today,” he said sincerely. “You can’t buy me off because that’s not what I want. I want– listen to me, Heather–I want to find out why nobody knows me. You most of all. And since you’re a six I thought you might be able to explain it. Do you have _any_ memory of me? Look at me on the picture screen. Look!”
She peered, one eyebrow cocked. “You’re young but not too young. You’re good-looking. Your voice is commanding and you have no reluctance about brigging me like this. You’re exactly what a twerp fan would look like, sound like, act like. Okay; are you satisfied?”
“I’m in trouble,” he said. It was blatantly irrational for him to tell her this, since she had no recollection of any sort of him. But over the years he had become accustomed to laying his troubles before her–and listening to hers–and the habit had not died. The habit ignored what he saw the reality situation to be: it cruised on under its own power.
“That’s a shame,” Heather said.
Jason said, “Nobody remembers me. And I have no birth certificate; I was never born, never even born! So naturally I have no ID cards except a forged set I bought from a pol fink for two thousand dollars plus one thousand for my contact. I’m carrying them around, but, God: they may have microtransmitters built into them. Even knowing that I have to keep them on me; you know why–even you up at the top, even you know how this society works. Yesterday I had thirty million viewers who would have shrieked their aggrieved heads off if a pol or a nat so much as touched me. Now I’m looking into the eyes of an FLC.”
“What’s an FLC?”
“Forced-labor camp.” He snarled the words at her, trying to pin her down and finally nail her. “The vicious little bitch who forged my papers made me take her out to some Godforsaken broken-down wop restaurant, and while we were there, just talking, she threw herself down on the floor screaming. Psychotic screaming; she’s an escapee from Morningside, by her own admission. That cost me another three hundred dollars and by now who knows? She’s probably sicced the pols and nats _both_ on me.” Pushing his self-pity gingerly a little further, he said, “They’re probably monitoring this phone line right now.”
“Oh, Christ, no!” Heather shrieked and again hung up.
He had no more gold quinques. So, at this point, he gave up. That was a stupid thing to say, he realized, that about the phone lines. That would make anybody hang up. I strangled myself in my own word web, right down the old freeber. Straight down the middle. Beautifully flat at both ends, too. Like a great artificial anus.
He shoved the door of the phone booth aside and stepped out onto the busy nocturnal sidewalk. . . down here, he thought acidly, in Slumsville. Down where the pol finks hang out. Jolly good show, as that classic TV muffin ad went that we studied in school, he said to himself.
It would be funny, he thought, if it were happening to someone else. But it’s happening to me. No, it’s not funny either way. Because there is real suffering and real death passing the time of day in the wings. Ready to come on any minute.
I wish I could have taped the phone call, plus everything Kathy said to me and me to her. In 3-D color, on videotape it would be a nice bit on my show, somewhere near the end where we run out of material occasionally. Occasionally, hell: generally. Always. For the rest of my life.
He could hear his intro now. “What can happen to a man, a good man without a pol record, a man who suddenly one day loses his ID cards and finds himself facing . . .” And so forth. It would hold them, all thirty million of them. Because that was what each of them feared. “An invisible man,” his intro would go, “yet a man all too conspicuous. Invisible legally; conspicuous illegally. What becomes of such a man, if he cannot replace . . .” Blah blah. On and on. The hell with it. Not everything that he did or said or had happen to him got onto the show; so it went with this. Another loser, among many. Many are called, he said to himself, but few are chosen. That’s what it means to be a pro. That’s how I manage things, public and private. Cut your losses and run when you have to, he told himself, quoting himself from back in the good days when his first full worldwide show got piped onto the satellite grid.
I’ll find another forger, he decided, one that isn’t a pol informer, and get a full new set of ID cards, ones without microtransmitters. And then, evidently, I need a gun.
I should have thought of that about the time I woke up in that hotel room, he said to himself. Once, years ago, when the Reynolds syndicate had tried to buy into his show, he had learned to use–and had carried–a gun: a Barber’s Hoop with a range of two miles with no loss of peak trajectory until the final thousand feet.
Kathy’s “mystical trance,” her screaming fit. The audio portion would carry a mature male voice saying against her screams as BG, “This is what it is to be psychotic. To be psychotic is to suffer, suffer beyond . . .” And so forth. Blah blah. He inhaled a great, deep lungful of cold night air, shuddered, joined the passengers on the sea of sidewalk, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.
And found himself facing a queue lined up ten deep before a pol random checkpoint. One gray-clad policeman stood at the end of the line, loitering there to make sure no one doubled back in the opposite direction.
“Can’t you pass it, friend?” the pol said to him as he involuntarily started to leave.
“Sure,” Jason said.
“That’s good,” the pol said good-humoredly. “Because we’ve been checking here since eight this morning and we still don’t have our work quota.”
6
Two husky gray pols, confronting the man ahead of Jason, said in unison, “These were forged an hour ago; they’re still damp. See? See the ink run under the heat? Okay.” They nodded, and the man, gripped by four thungly pols, disappeared into a parked van-quibble, ominously gray and black: police colors.