We Can Build You By Philip K. Dick

Once more we were just a little firm out to make money; we had no grand vision, only a scheme to get rich. We were another Barrows but on a tiny, wretched scale; we had his greed but not his size. We would soon, if possible, commence a schlock Nanny operation; probably we would market our product by some phony sales pitch, some gimmick comparable to the classified “repossession” ad which we had been using.

“No,” I said to Maury. “It’s terrible. Forget it.”

Pausing at the door he yelled, “WHY? It’s terrific.”

“Because,” I said, “it’s–” I could not express it. I felt worn out and despairing–and, even more than that, lonely. For who or what? For Pris Frauenzimmer? For Barrows, for the entire gang of them, Barrows and Blunk and Colleen Nild and Bob Bundy and Pris; what were they doing, right now? What crazy, wild, impractical scheme were they hatching out? I longed to know. We, Maury and I and Jerome and my brother Chester, we had been left behind.

“Say it,” Maury said, dancing about with exasperation. “Why?”

I said, “It’s–corny.”

“Corny! The hell it is.” He glared at me, baffled.

“Forget the idea. What do you suppose Barrows is up to, right this minute? You think they’re building the Edwards family? Or are they stealing our Centennial idea? Or hatching out something entirely new? Maury, we don’t have any vision. That’s what’s wrong. No vision.”

“Sure we do.”

“No,” I said. “_Because we’re not crazy_. We’re sober and sane. We’re not like your daughter, we’re not like Barrows. Isn’t that a fact? You mean you can’t feel it? The lack of that, here in this house? Some lunatic clack-clacking away at some monstrous nutty project until all hours, maybe leaving it half done right in the middle and going on to something else, something equally nutty?”

“Maybe so,” Maury said. “But god almighty, Louis; we can’t just lie down and die because Pris went over to the other side. Don’t you imagine I’ve had thoughts of this kind? I knew her a lot better than you, buddy, a hell of a lot better. I’ve been tormented every night, thinking about them all together, but we have to go on and do the best we can. This idea of yours; it may not be equal to the electric light or the match, but it’s good. It’s small and it’s salable. It’ll work. And what do we have that’s better? At least it’ll save us money, save us having to hire some outside designer to fly out here and design the body of the Nanny, and an engineer to take Bundy’s place–assuming we could get one. Right, buddy?”

Save us money, I thought. Pris and Barrows wouldn’t have bothered to worry about that; look at them send that van to carry her things all the way from Boise to Seattle. We’re small-time. We’re little.

We’re beetles.

Without Pris–without her.

What did I do? I asked myself. Fall in love with her? A woman with eyes of ice, a calculating, ambitious schizoid type, a ward of the Federal Government’s Mental Health Bureau who will need psychotherapy the rest of her life, an ex-psychotic who engages in catatonic-excitement harebrained projects, who vilifies and attacks everyone in sight who doesn’t give her exactly what she wants when she wants it? What a woman, what a _thing_ to fall in love with. What terrible fate is in store for me now?

It was as if Pris, to me, were both life itself–and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending, and yet also the spirit of existence itself. Movement: she was motion itself. Life in its growing, planning, calculating, harsh, thoughtless actuality. I could not stand having her around me; I could not stand being without her. Without Pris I dwindled away until I became nothing and eventually died like a bug in the backyard, unnoticed and unimportant; around her I was slashed, goaded, cut to pieces, stepped on–yet somehow I lived: in that, I was real. Did I enjoy suffering? No. It was that it seemed as if suffering was part of life, part of being with Pris. Without Pris there was no suffering, nothing erratic, unfair, unbalanced. But also, there was nothing alive, only small-time schlock schemes, a dusty little office with two or three men scrabbling in the sand .

God knew I didn’t want to suffer at Pris’s hands or at anyone else’s. But suffering was an indication that reality was close by. In a dream there is fright, but not literal, slow, bodily pain, the daily torment that Pris made us endure by her very presence. It was not something which she did to us deliberately; it was a natural outgrowth of what she was.

We could evade it only by getting rid of her, and that was what we had done: we had lost her. And with her went reality itself, with all its contradictions and peculiarities; life now would be predictable: we would produce the Civil War Soldier Nannies, we would have a certain amount of money, and so forth. But what did it mean? What did it matter?

“Listen,” Maury was saying to me. “We have to go on.”

I nodded.

“I mean it,” Maury said loudly in my ear. “We can’t give up. We’ll call a meeting of the Board, like we were going to do; you tell them your idea, fight for your idea like you really believed in it. Okay? You promise?” He whacked me on the back. “Come on, goddam you, or I’ll give you a crack in the eye that’ll send you to the hospital. Buddy, come on!”

“Okay,” I said, “but I feel you’re talking to someone on the other side of the grave.”

“Yeah, and you look like it, too. But come on anyhow and let’s get going; you go downstairs and talk Stanton into it; I know Lincoln won’t give us any trouble–all he does is sit there in his room and chuckle over _Winnie the Pooh_.”

“What the hell is that? Another kids’ book?”

“That’s right, buddy,” Maury said. “So go on down there.”

I did so, feeling a little cheered up. But nothing would bring me back to life, not really, except for Pris. I had to deal with that fact and face it with greater force every moment of the day.

The first item which we found in the Seattle papers having to do with Pris almost got by us, because it did not seem to be about Pris at all. We had to read the item again and again until we were certain.

It told about Sam K. Barrows–that was what had caught our eye. And a stunning young artist he had been seen at nightclubs with. The girl’s name, according to the columnist, was Pristine Womankind.

“Jeezus!” Maury screeched, his face black. “That’s her name; that’s a translation of Frauenzimmer. But it isn’t. Listen, buddy; I always put everybody on about that, you and Pris and my ex-wife. Frauenzimmer doesn’t mean womankind; it means ladies of pleasure. You know. Streetwalkers.” He reread the item incredulously. “She’s changed her name but she doesn’t know; hell, it ought to be Pristine Streetwalkers. What a farce, I mean, it’s insane. You know what it is? That _Marjorie Morningstar_; her name was Morgenstern, and it meant Morningstar; Pris got the idea from that, too. And Priscilla to Pristine. I’m going mad.” He paced frantically around the office, rereading the newspaper item again and again. “I know it’s Pris; it has to be. Listen to the description. You tell me if this isn’t Pris:

Seen at Swami’s: None other than Sam (The Big Man) Barrows,

escorting what for the kiddies who stay up late we like to

call his “new protégé,” a sharper-than-a-sixthgrade-teacher’s-

grading-pencil chick, name of–if you can swallow this–

Pristine Womankind, with a better-than-this-world expression,

like she doesn’t dig us ordinary mortals, black hair, and a

figure that would make those old wooden fronts of ships

(y’know the kind?) green with envy. Also in the company,

Dave Blunk, the attorney, tells us that Pris is an artist,

with other talents which you CAN’T . . . see. . . and, Dave

grins, maybe going to show up on TV . . . one of these years,

as an actress, no less! . . .

“God, what rubbish,” Maury said, tossing the paper down. “How can those gossip columnists write like that? They’re demented. But you can tell it’s Pris anyhow. What’s that mean about her going to turn up as a TV actress?”

I said, “Barrows must own a TV station or a piece of one.”

“He owns a dogfood company that cans whale blubber,” Maury said. “And it sponsors a TV show once a week, a sort of circus and variety piece of business. He’s probably putting the bite on them to give Pris a couple of minutes. But doing what? She can’t act! She has no talents! I think I will call the police. Get Lincoln in here; I want an attorney’s advice.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *