Alien Accounts (25 page)

A large flake of black fell from his face. The good-luck scars were
beginning to look like sabre scars. Max excused himself and fled before Mr Murd could say anything sarcastic.

SPECIAL DETAIL
1A4A-ooo.9/Blue:
PRIORITY
1A
CONFIDENTIAL LIST SUSPECTED WORDS GRP
3:

communal

communal property

communalism

communalist

communalistic

communalise

communally

communicate

communard

commune w/spirits

commune

communicable

communicability

communicability of disease

communicably

communicant

communicate

communicate emotion

communicate info

communication

communication network

communicative

communicator

communicatory

communion, holy

communion of saints

communiqué

communism

communist

communitas

communitarian

community

‘I want facts!’ Heiliger shouted, or so the sub-title said he shouted. ‘I want statistics, flow diagrams, charts, programmes, bulletins, brochures, illustrated parts breakdowns, graphs, lists, instructions, memoranda, encyclicals, equations, probabilities, waybills, forms, registers, catalogues, time tickets …’

The doctors looked at one another. There were seven, though each saw six.

‘But you’ve seen with your own eyes …’

‘Nothing! Nothing to the nothingth power. Tricks, demonstrations. I want
data
, gentlemen. Where are your
data
?’

Here David interrupted the general and seven doctors, saying:

‘Know ye not it is written: “Unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” Know ye not even that?’ And they were confounded.

But who will help me turn the pages of the giant book? Not the giant book that I am in and you are in, but a lesser giant book. We are making the titles today, for this is the proverbial ‘book of the movie’.

I opened David’s eyes and sat up on the tablet.

‘… refrangible …’

‘The Sinister Bean’, I read. The players were King Real and his three daughters: Girl One, Range and Code Liar. Exit all. This may be the shortest play in my long and successful career.

Just for laughs I balled up the general, doctors, lab and all – the whole newspaper it was in – and set fire to it. But that would only be in first ‘world-set’, A. There would have to be a B where the paper was printed, where I sat in a dirty lab burning it. One may posit a further -B where I unburn the paper, unwrinkle it, and read. There might also be world-sets where the paper reads me, or where the paper and I read each other. Each of these has obvious extensions, and the whole set would
make a nice matrix for General Heiliger.

I handed it to him and he said, ‘A code?’

‘And of course then it was a code. We spent the rest of the time before the commercial doodling word games,’ the next David explained. In the beginning was the Word Game (Even in Eden in Eve) and then came the War Game (Who will ever remember how Hayhanen fingered Abel; Hayhanen of the simple, unbreakable cipher: a substitution followed by two transpositions), and so on through Gematria (the angel guarding the seventieth quinary is I.B.M.) and the wary games of Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson = Gorged on a chi[l]d’s lewd lust).

‘Break this code,’ I defined, ‘and you break it all.’

But how did they get into and out of the room? I posited a projectionist turning off the film long enough for them to slip off-screen, then someone to authorise this, and so on, I was off again. That’s what happens when your imagination can’t work up even a sinister bean.

Stoat addressed the CIA stockholders.

‘It’s the Hawthorne experiment all over again,’ he said, switching on the projector. ‘This is the factory of Western Electric (suppliers to the Bell System) at Hawthorne, Connecticut. When workers were isolated as an experimental group, cut off from ordinary supervision, their output went up – no matter what other changes were made in their environment.

‘Drum Inc. is trying something similar, isolating workers not only from job supervision, but from the
supervision of reality
. There is something shady about the entire company – shady in the sense of insubstantial – not to mention the Lion Oil Company, which I suspect to be a mapping on to the surface of reality of the wholly abstract Drum corporation.

‘Now this is a map of Connecticut. Notice how the name of the state has been slightly disjointed, thus:

CONNECT I CUT

‘And this is a picture of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), whose ancestor hanged nineteen women in one witchcraft trial. He remained a recluse for most of his life, and my hypothesis is that during that time he did not in fact exist. In evidence I submit the work of Dr Stoneweg on the curious absence of grocery bills during that period.

‘Hawthorne was obsessed with the notion of disappearance. In his story “Wakefield” he tells of a man who kisses his wife goodbye one day, moves to a place a few dozen yards away, and there remains in hiding for twenty years, watching his own house. In another story, he says:

The heart, the heart – there was the little boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord.

‘We of course are far from these “realities” of which he speaks. We sit or stand here in this expensively furnished room, having enjoyed perhaps our good meal at the state’s expense in the cafeteria downstairs, moderately well-dressed and enjoying the comfort of a good pipe.’

Here Stoat took out his wooden gun and mimed with it the gestures of satisfied pipe-smoking. Those who had them took out their own pipes and held them aloft, feeling perhaps that they were voting on reality.

‘But all of this
real
reality is in danger! The words “connect”, “I” and “cut” move ever farther apart. Drum Inc. is performing an experiment on a “David” – and on us! Maybe it is only a dexterity experiment – maybe it is something far more sinister. The election of a movie star to the office of governor of California (there is a Hawthorne there, too, and not far from Watts) already shows how easy it is to map one reality on to another. Life is a picture magazine, Time is a montage of weekly news, Space is where men become stars, while Reality is where “stars” take the place of men.

‘I have seen a certain incredible film of my own wife, cinema verité … newsreals … excuse me, I … TV dinners … pain in the South … sensory deprivation experiments … reality too is an experi … but why … they must understand … some things better left in the hands of the government …’

He moved into the beam of the projector. It lined him with a map of Connecticut, and gave him West Hartford as a third eye, while he moved his hands and mouth earnestly, and talked on and on.

‘Where the hell is it?’

‘Talk, Logan, or we’ll beat the living cancer out of you.’

‘Yang,’ Logan coughed. ‘Lung cancer, very Yang. As for your heart …’ He glanced towards the open window.

‘No!’ The others fought for a place to see out, down.

‘Where is it? See anything?’

‘There’s a big Alsatian down there – burying something!’

Born, Stoneweg and Gibbel rushed from the ward, but, at a wink from Logan, his two friends remained.

‘You didn’t throw it out?’

‘I threw out a worthless lymph gland, to attract that dog I happened to notice on the lawn. It had just been eating at a garbage can, therefore I deduced it would retrieve the gland and
bury
it – as in fact happened.’

‘But how did you know it would notice the gland at all?’

‘I have made a study of all breeds of dogs and their peculiar eating habits. The Alsatian is, above all others, fond of “sweetbreads”. It would have greatly surprised me had he
not
seized upon it.’

Logan lit a perhaps opiated cigarette and feigned
ennui.

‘But the heart?’

‘I held it in my hand and nodded towards the window. My hand of course concealed it in the ample folds of my lab gown. It was simple mis-direction – an old conjurer’s trick.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I deposited the heart where I was sure
no one
would think to look for it – not if they dig up the
entire
lawn around the building. In
the most obvious place
of all, paradoxically
the most well-concealed.’
The others seemed mystified, so he added, ‘Look in Raymond Galt’s chest, why don’t you?’

Having drawn their weapons from the small-arms pool, the employees were assembled in the cafeteria to be briefed.

‘This is it, men and women,’ said Max Heiliger, whose face and hands were swathed in white bandages. He unveiled the battle plan amid mild applause.

‘Hey, that looks like a pair of somebody’s pants!’

Max turned to give the employee a look. ‘That looks nothing like a pair of pants. It’s a battle plan. Anyone who refers to Mr Murd’s pants, or to anyone else’s pants, will lose all candy and ice cream and cigarette privileges until further notice. Is that clear?’ He then turned his attention to the plan, which was a pair of Mr Murd’s enormous pants. He outlined his plan for Phase Three, reading off the creases in the seat.

‘Our objective today is the telephone cable running from Stoneweg Street down 14th Avenue past the D Hotel, across Panavision Street and terminating at the Robert Hall Store on the corner of Reagan and Avenue of the Playmates of the Month. Write down all those addresses and
get them right – we
don’t want anyone wandering around asking cops directions at the last moment. Any questions?’

‘Yes, sir. Why is this
particular
cable important?’

General Heiliger froze with his back to the audience, his elegant baton pointing to the Robert Hall crease. How could he begin to tell them? Robert Hall, mass-manufactured suits … look-alike clothes, uniforms … effective identification of friend and foe … disruption of all vital mass-consumption products, Howard Johnson restaurants, A & P essential … essentially a matter of molecular rearrangement of “society” … finding new isomers … people of gold, perhaps … purple of gold …

He cleared his throat and turned to them. The black splendor of his SS uniform contrasted with white bandages would give them confidence, he knew … secret of newspaper success …

‘All cable is important, son,’ he said. ‘Any more questions?’

MEMORANDUM

From the desk of Gen. Max Heiliger (Ret.)

To: H. H. Murd

The interesting thing about Phil Wang, about using him as a sniper, is that he’s had experience. Despite his Chinese (?) name, Phil is Japanese, and served with the Imperial Army.

This memo cancels and supersedes all other memos on the subject.

Regards,

Max

Wearing a peaked Imperial Army cap (bought from a war souvenir store), very large black-rimmed glasses (boutique) and artificial enormous buck teeth (novelty shop), Phil settled himself high in an elm at the corner of Nixon Ave. and Chas. Whitman Street. He picked off one cop before he’d even had time to adjust the sight for windage; maybe it was luck.

When he’d disposed of a half-dozen more, Phil took off the cap and ran his fingers around the inside, looking for the name. There it was, the ideograms faded but still legible: ‘the armour-maker from the armour-making land’.

Too cumbersome a translation. While he holed a few more badges, he tried cleaning it up: ‘The armour-maker from Armorica.’ The National Guard arrived; he picked off a dozen while they messed around trying to park their jeeps and trucks in a pattern.

As a professional, he appreciated the shiny new intricate weapons, the nylon bulletproof vests, the teargas – but pitied them for not realising that he was The Indestructible Jap. Wiped out in a library of war comics, he came to life in ten libraries more, to taunt them:

‘What the matter, Yankee dog? No gut, Joe?’

They milled around uncertainly, looking as if they wanted to give up and go back to their homeland across the tracks. He even tried sticking his face out in the open and giving them an evil grin, but – nothing.

Well screw ‘em, he’d commit honorable suicide; the Indestructible Jap always had that way out of the last panel. He bared a foot and clamped the false buck teeth around the gun muzzle. Fugg ‘em. None of these kids remembered Bataan or Corregidor any more; they all thought Japan was where diminutive people played baseball and made transistor radios. Fugg that.