Alien Accounts (20 page)

Something is troubling Marilyn,
thought Eric.
She keeps that pink hankie in front of her nose all the time.

But no matter I’ll just sit here on this train very quietly, I’ll just sit here and look at that young man No he’s looking back maybe thinks I’m queer and hates queers or maybe is queer I’ll look

I’ll sit here and look at that young woman No she thinks I’m trying to pick her up my god the man next to her is her husband or something now he’s looking at me they’re both looking at me I’d better

Sit here and look at that young woman very good looking who has taken the place of the queer or queer hater Christ she gave me a funny contemptuous look and opened a book she knows too well what nasty thoughts were starting

I wish I had a book I’ll just sit here and look at that man with the briefcase god he’s a cop he’s looking back like a cop would quick look anywhere No not too fast better casually glance over

To this old woman what harm could she do me but I just know she’s the type that imagines every young man who looks at her is some kind of rapist look away quick not too quick to the respectable well-dressed young Negro obviously a Black Power person hates all whiteys thinks I stare at him because he’s black I’ll just glance over at that innocent child is that a piercing glance I’m getting back from the mother what does she think I’m a pervert of some kind oh well how about the nice old immigrant workman across from me surely I can look at him his fly’s open others are looking at me looking studying my reaction none look over at that man reading a newspaper interesting half of a headline he sees I’m reading rattles his paper and folds it with the headline inside I may never know who is To Drive ‘Bad-Luck’ Lotus is that the knee of the man next to me touching mine yes Christ the car is full of queers now what I can’t move away without giving up some of my
lebensraum
but if I push him back he’ll think it’s a signal follow me home is that pair of teenaged girls giggling about me just two more stops hold on I’ll just look at that fat lady No she sees I see how fat she is do I look fat to her too she looks firmly at the advertisement over my head I look firmly at the
advertisement over her head stalemate.

Dr Stoneweg spoke to the assembled stockholders of Lion Oil and Drum Inc. on his work at the Hannibal (Missouri) Institute for Adanced Studies, in particular the ‘solar bomb’ project. ‘I pray to God we’ll never need this big baby,’ he said, referring to the weapon, which could cause the sun to become a supernova. ‘But if we do need it, we’re ready.’

Drs Freag, Born, Ortiz, Reynolds, Gibbel, Logan and Stoneweg then asked if the stockholders had any questions.

Mr Fenster Moold asked what was the point of all this talk, talk, talk? Wasn’t it time for
action?
Mr H. Greubhel asked if any of these airy inventions meant anything in hard dollars and cents. Mrs Rose Garland said that she, a Gold Star mother, was not going to sit here and let anyone run down America that way. Mr Joyce Britt asked if there were anyone in the hall who doubted that Jesus Christ was a regular fellow. If so, would that person care to step outside for a thrashing?

(Radio-TV Advertisement)

A Modern Miracle.

A Modern Miracle of action.

Double action. Quick-acting deep-down action,

Where it counts.

Yes, deep-down action,

Truly,

A Modern Miracle.

(Radio-TV Advertisement)

Wherever you see this sign

It means a place you can
trust
,

People you can rely upon …

Friendly
people.

Wherever you see this sign,

It means
good things
in store for
you.

‘EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR’ DIES – PACEMAKER FAULTY

Grave to be marked with Suggestion Box

DISASSEMBLY OF THE G
18-
OKO-II HUMAN BEING

Fig. 1
G18-OKO-II HUMAN BEING

Marilyn listed all possible men who loved her:

Ray

Eric

her father

her brother, Bill

Jesus?

What if we fail to describe the president, Hernando Horario Murd?

Then we have no guarantee of his physical identifiable reality. Miss Bunne, his secretary, might not know what to do with important letters marked ‘For the Immediate Attention of H. H. Murd.’

Certainly. First she could take them to the door marked with the above name. Then through it, to the desk placarded with the above name. Then she could check the name on the letterhead stationery in the desk drawer. Then she could check the name on the memo stationery in the other desk drawer. Then she could check the initials on the golf balls, if any, if initialled, in the other desk drawer.

Then she could check the monogram on the shirt pocket of any person seated at the desk, the monogram on the gold pen clipped to the shirt pocket, and the name on the ALL AREAS CLEARANCE company I.D. badge pinned just above the shirt pocket. Then she could check the full-color photo on the badge against the face of the sitter, the wearer.

And she could read the name and traceable numbers on papers from the sitter-and-wearer’s billfold, including driver’s license, credit cards, Health Salon Membership, parking ticket(s), love letter(s), business cards, business letters, an ‘I Am a Diabetic, in Case of Collapse, Notify a Physician’ card, an ‘I Am a Catholic, in Case of Accident, Notify a Priest’ card, or an ‘I Am Deaf’ card, bearing on the obverse a request for money, on the reverse an Alphabet of the Hand.

Then, using the Alphabet of the Hand, she could ask the person at the desk for a signature, fingerprints, voiceprints, footprints, a retina photograph, and an earprint, hair and skin samples, an ounce of blood, a complete personal history. She could question the person on the person’s personal history, using a polygraph and/or truth serums.

But all these things can be faked.

True, as can ordinary recognition signs. Gentlemen, we are at an impasse. I suggest we vote to describe him, and put the description on record, reserving our question of its validity until the committee has finished fact-finding about the question of ‘validity’ itself. Agreed?

Begin, then, with his shoelaces, double-tied, black. The ferrules resemble tightly-rolled strips of microfilm.

These are laced through sixteen holes of his two black, perforated, wing-tip oxfords. The perforations resemble those of edge-notched cards used in one popular index system. The mirror finish reflects dark distortions of the scene around them, a scene chiefly of other shoes and the lower parts of furniture.

The heels of these oxfords are suspiciously large and thick. They might almost be hollow heels of the type favoured by smugglers and spies for concealment of heroin or deathkit. A deathkit is simply a tiny hollow
needle and a soft plastic ampule of strychnine. Being a diabetic, though neither a Catholic nor deaf, Mr Murd would not be afraid of needles.

The suit is enormous, the colour and roughly the shape of some prototype atom bomb. There is no tie. Every day the suit walks in at the same time. Miss Bunne takes its arm to help it sit down heavily, easing the seat of the huge trousers into the day’s pattern of wrinkles.

Now I think we can turn it over to Stoat from here.

Agent Bob was thirty years old, though he was not writing a poem about it. Instead, he knocked out his usual daily thousand words of Memoirs of a CIA man, which he had tentatively entitled
I Killed for You:

I gave her a rabbit punch to knock the poison capsule out of her mouth. Then I kicked her until she wasn’t pretty anymore. I kept thinking of what that
.
375 Magnum slug had done to Larry’s face …

The memoirs included plenty of travel to Rome, Paris, Monaco, and various pleasure centres, where Bob won large sums of money at roulette, baccarat, etc., just after he had explained the rules in detail. He also knew plenty about wines, sports cars, weapons and anything else difficult to get through Customs, which he had no difficulty doing. He managed one exciting fuck per chapter, one good kill per chapter, or the equivalent. People who phoned him rarely finished their call alive, and when he approached his own Hilton hotel room, Bob usually got an eerie feeling …

In short, the whole thing managed to disguise pretty well Bob’s job as a code clerk. Now and then he tailed a suspect – always the same one – and his only other duty was clipping periodicals for the hunchboard.

The hunchboard was not an information source; that was the domain of the CIA computer which daily digested 200 world magazines and newspapers. The hunchboard was a source of inspiration. Mr Stoat, Bob’s chief, would select a few items almost at random, have Bob clip them out, and tack them up with his constantly-changing collage of headlines, pictures, features and ads. From these, Mr Stoat was somehow able to develop hypotheses about world affairs.

Bob’s thirtieth birthday found him clipping out a bra ad, and lost in a daydream about gunning down Stoat where he stood.

For almost no reason, Bob hated this sun-bronzed little man who resembled a handsome, if foreshortened, executive. He hated everything about him: the hunchboard, the way he hummed, the fact that he wore his shaggy wool overcoat in the office, the fact that he carried, not a real gun, but a toy: a wooden block printed with a picture of a gun.

Piff! Blat! Puffs of dust rose from the shaggy wool. The stocky man spun and flopped like a rag doll, gushing blood through its tanned nostrils.

Bob snipped viciously across the page. Unaware of his death, Mr Stoat stood before the hunchboard, gaining insights. He gained insights into
subversive plots, subversive counterplots, his own plan for world domination. He looked worriedly at the ceiling, the toy gun he was using as a pointer, Bob, the board, Bob.

‘Look out, Bob, you’re spoiling her tits.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

Buddha-buddha. Bob gripped the two scissor handles, one in each hand, and pulled the trigger. Tracer after tracer plowed into the placid back. Stoat made irritated little hums.

‘Hmm. Hmm.’ He studied clippings from
Grit, Rod & Custom, The Sacred Heart Messenger
. ‘Ummm.’ He compared war news with suppository ads. ‘Choo-de-choom.’ He marked the conjunction of General Motors’ sales graph with pictures of dead movie stars, then with a thalidomide item. ‘Hmp?’
Russia’s Secret Space Deaths
went between
Is Your Marriage Really Sublime?
and
The Kind of Girl Tab Hunter Wants.

‘Hmp. Hmp. Hmp.’

Bob drowned the little noises in a wave of .50 calibre fire. Tun. Tununun. Tununununun.

‘Ho!’ Stoat tore scraps of
McCalls, The IBM Song Book
and
Detective Comics
from the board and threw them on the floor. Then he knelt and stirred them with the toy weapon. ‘Yup!’ His face was grim. ‘Looks bad, Bob.’

‘A crisis, sir?’

‘In transportation or communication. Could be only a bomb in a train station, such as Batman here finds, but Mars is in conjunction with Saturn, is it? – that means something really
big
. Subliminal panic messages inserted in a prime-time TV show, causing a run on rifles that could cripple our rifle industry maybe, I don’t know. An army strike? Who can say? A pop singer discovers a new sound that sets off a slow-destruct mechanism buried one million years ago in the cerebral cortex. Your guess is as good as mine. The palm of the president, as revealed in the blown-up photo of a speech, reveals tendencies towards aggression, self-deprecating remarks, constipation, should seek new friends this week, not keep analretentive hold on Vietnam, cloacal gold standard. It’s anybody’s ball game.

‘Los Angeles and San Francisco riding the San Andreas fault, due for earthquake – could be a tie-in with the Original Fault. Can’t rightly say. Film industry, half TV industry wiped out next Columbus Day, cross-reference to Columbia Broadcasting? To Christopher movement? Their motto: “YOU can change the world”. California is altogether a bad complex; maybe it
should
be removed without narcotics, astringents, or surgery. Could demonstrations at Berkeley (“I am a human being. Please do not fold, staple, spindle or mutilate”) be link-up with Bishop Berkeley (“all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind … their being is to
be perceived or known
”)? You tell me.’