Paycheck (2003) (41 page)

Ian turned to face her and said in a level voice, ‘Do you get to keep the embryo? Bring it home in a bottle or sprayed with special luminous paint so it glows in the dark like a night light?’

‘In any color you want!’

‘The
embryo
?’

‘No, the bottle. And the color of the fluid. It’s in a preservative solution, so really it’s a lifetime acquisition. It even has a written guarantee, I think.’

Ian folded his arms to keep himself calm: alpha state condition. ‘Do you know that there are people who would want to have a child? Even an ordinary dumb one? That go to the County Facility week after week looking for a little newborn baby? These ideas - there’s been this world panic about overpopulation. Nine trillion humans stacked like kindling in every block of every city. Okay, if that were going on—’ He gestured. ‘But what we have now is not
enough
children. Or don’t you watch TV or read the
Times
?’

‘It’s a drag,’ Cynthia said. ‘For instance, today Walter came into the house freaked out because the abortion truck cruised by. It’s a drag taking care of him.
You
have it easy; you’re at work. But
me
—’

‘You know what I’d like to do to the Gestapo abortion wagon? Have two ex-drinking buddies of mine armed with BARs, one on each side of the road. And when the wagon passes by—’

‘It’s a ventilated air-conditioned truck, not a wagon.’

He glared at her and then went to the bar in the kitchen to fix himself a drink. Scotch will do, he decided. Scotch and milk, a good before-‘dinner’ drink.

As he mixed his drink, his son Walter came in. He had, on his face, an unnatural pallor.

‘The ‘bort truck went by today, didn’t it?’ Ian said.

‘I thought maybe—’

‘No way. Even if your mother and I saw a lawyer and had a legal document drawn up, an un-D Form, you’re too old. So relax.’

‘I know intellectually,’ Walter said, ‘but—’

‘ “Do not seek to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,” ‘Ian quoted (inaccurately). ‘Listen, Walt, let me lay something on you.’ He took a big, long drink of Scotch and milk. ‘The name of all this is,
kill me
. Kill them when they’re the size of a fingernail, or a baseball, or later on, if you haven’t done it already, suck the air out of the lungs of a ten-year-old boy and let him die. It’s a certain kind of woman advocating this all. They used to call them “castrating females”. Maybe that was once the right term, except that these women, these hard cold women, didn’t just want to - well, they want to do in the
whole
boy or man, make all of them dead, not just the part that makes him a man. Do you see?’

‘No,’ Walter said, but in a dim sense, very frightening, he did.

After another hit of his drink, Ian said, ‘And we’ve got one living right here, Walter. Here in our very house.’

‘What do we have living here?’

‘What the Swiss psychiatrists call a
kindermorder
,’ Ian said, deliberately choosing a term he knew his boy wouldn’t understand. ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘you and I could get onto an Amtrak coach and head north and just keep on going until we reached Vancouver, British Columbia, and we could take a ferry to Vancouver Island and never be seen by anybody down here again.’

‘But what about Mom?’

‘I would send her a cashier’s check,’ Ian said. ‘Each month. And she would be quite happy with that.’

‘It’s cold up there, isn’t it?’ Walter said. ‘I mean, they have hardly any fuel and they wear—’

‘About like San Francisco. Why? Are you afraid of wearing a lot of sweaters and sitting close to the fireplace? What did you see today that frightened you a hell of a lot more?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He nodded somberly.

‘We could live on a little island off Vancouver Island and raise our own food. You can plant stuff up there and it grows. And the truck won’t come there; you’ll never see it again. They have different laws. The women up there are different. There was this one girl I knew when I was up there for a while, a long time ago; she had long black hair and smoked Players cigarettes all the time and never ate anything or ever stopped talking. Down here we’re seeing a civilization in which the desire by women to destroy their own—’ Ian broke off; his wife had walked into the kitchen.

‘If you drink any more of that stuff,’ she said to him, ‘you’ll barf it up.’

‘Okay,’ Ian said irritably. ‘Okay!’

‘And don’t yell,’ Cynthia said. ‘I thought for dinner tonight it’d be nice if you took us out. Dal Rey’s said on TV they have steak for early comers.’

Wrinkling his nose, Walter said, ‘They have raw oysters.’

‘Blue points,’ Cynthia said. ‘In the half shell, on ice. I love them. All right, Ian? Is it decided?’

To his son Walter, Ian said, ‘A raw blue point oyster looks like nothing more on earth than what the surgeon—’ He became silent, then. Cynthia glared at him, and his son was puzzled. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but I get to order steak.’

‘Me too,’ Walter said.

Finishing his drink, Ian said more quietly, ‘When was the last time you fixed dinner here in the house? For the three of us?’

‘I fixed you that pigs’ ears and rice dish on Friday,’ Cynthia said. ‘Most of which went to waste because it was something new and on the nonmandatory list. Remember,
dear
?’

Ignoring her, Ian said to his son, ‘Of course, that type of woman will sometimes, even often be found up there, too. She has existed throughout time and all cultures. But since Canada has no law permitting postpartum—’ He broke off. ‘It’s the carton of milk talking,’ he explained to Cynthia. ‘They adulterate it these days with sulfur. Pay no attention or sue somebody; the choice is yours.’

Cynthia, eyeing him, said, ‘Are you running a fantasy number in your head again about splitting?’

‘Both of us,’ Walter broke in. ‘Dad’s taking me with him.’

‘Where?’ Cynthia said, casually.

Ian said. ‘Wherever the Amtrak track leads us.’

‘We’re going to Vancouver Island in Canada,’ Walter said.

‘Oh, really?’ Cynthia said.

After a pause Ian said, ‘Really.’

‘And what the shit am I supposed to do when you’re gone? Peddle my ass down at the local bar? How’ll I meet the payments on the various—’

‘I will continually mail you checks,’ Ian said. ‘Bonded by giant banks.’

‘Sure. You bet. Yep. Right.’

‘You could come along,’ Ian said, ‘and catch fish by leaping into English Bay and grinding them to death with your sharp teeth. You could rid British Columbia of its fish population overnight. All those ground-up fish, wondering vaguely what happened … swimming along one minute and then this - ogre, this fish-destroying monster with a single luminous eye in the center of its forehead, falls on them and grinds them into grit. There would soon be a legend. News like that spreads. At least among the last surviving fish.’

‘Yeah, but Dad,’ Walter said, ‘suppose there are no surviving fish.’

‘Then it will have been all in vain,’ Ian said, ‘except for your mother’s own personal pleasure at having bitten to death an entire species in British Columbia, where fishing is the largest industry anyhow, and so many other species depend on it for survival.’

‘But then everyone in British Columbia will be out of work,’ Walter said.

‘No,’ Ian said, ‘they will be cramming the dead fish into cans to sell to Americans. You see, Walter, in the olden days, before your mother multi-toothedly bit to death all the fish in British Columbia, the simple rustics stood with stick in hand, and when a fish swam past, they whacked the fish over the head. This will
create
jobs, not eliminate them. Millions of cans of suitably marked—’

‘You know,’ Cynthia said quickly, ‘he believes what you tell him.’

Ian said, ‘What I tell him is true.’ Although not, he realized, in a literal sense. To his wife he said, ‘I’ll take you out to dinner. Get our ration stamps, put on that blue knit blouse that shows off your boobs; that way you’ll get a lot of attention and maybe they won’t remember to collect the stamps.’

‘What’s a “boob”?’ Walter asked.

‘Something fast becoming obsolete,’ Ian said, ‘like the Pontiac GTO. Except as an ornament to be admired and squeezed. Its function is dying away.’ As is our race, he thought, once we gave full rein to those who would destroy the unborn - in other words, the most helpless creatures alive.

‘A boob,’ Cynthia said severely to her son, ‘is a mammary gland that ladies possess which provides milk to their young.’

‘Generally there are two of them,’ Ian said. ‘Your operational boob and then your backup boob, in case there is power failure in the operational one. I suggest the elimination of a step in all this pre-person abortion mania,’ he said. ‘We will send all the boobs in the world to the County Facilities. The milk, if any, will be sucked out of them, by mechanical means of course; they will become useless and empty and then the young will die naturally, deprived of many and all sources of nourishment.’

‘There’s formula,’ Cynthia said, witheringly. ‘Similac and those. I’m going to change so we can go out.’ She turned and strode toward their bedroom.

‘You know,’ Ian said after her, ‘if there was any way you could get me classified as a pre-person, you’d send me there. To the Facility with the greatest facility.’ And, he thought, I’ll bet I wouldn’t be the only husband in California who went. There’d be plenty others. In the same bag as me, then as now.

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Cynthia’s voice came to him dimly; she had heard.

‘It’s not just a hatred for the helpless,’ Ian Best said. ‘More is involved. Hatred of what? Of everything that grows?’ You blight them, he thought, before they grow big enough to have muscle and the tactics and skill for fight - big like I am in relation to you, with my fully developed musculature and weight. So much easier when the other person - I should say pre-person - is floating and dreaming in the amniotic fluid and knows nothing about how to nor the need to hit back.

Where did the motherly virtues go to? he asked himself. When mothers
especially
protected what was small and weak and defenseless?

Our competitive society, he decided. The survival of the strong. Not the fit, he thought; just those who hold the
power
. And are not going to surrender it to the next generation: it is the powerful and evil old against the helpless and gentle new.

‘Dad,’ Walter said, ‘are we really going to Vancouver Island in Canada and raise real food and not have anything to be afraid of any more?’

Half to himself, Ian said, ‘Soon as I have the money.’

‘I know what that means. It’s a “we’ll see” number you say. We aren’t going, are we?’ He watched his father’s face intently. ‘She won’t let us, like taking me out of school and like that; she always brings up that … right?’

‘It lies ahead for us someday,’ Ian said doggedlly. ‘Maybe not this month but someday, sometime. I promise.’

‘And there’s no abortion trucks there.’

‘No. None. Canadian law is different.’

‘Make it soon, Dad. Please.’

His father fixed himself a second Scotch and milk and did not answer; his face was somber and unhappy, almost as if he was about to cry.

*

In the rear of the abortion truck three children and one adult huddled, jostled by the turning of the truck. They fell against the restraining wire that separated them, and Tim Gantro’s father felt keen despair at being cut off mechanically from his own boy. A nightmare during day, he thought. Caged like animals; his noble gesture had brought only more suffering to him.

‘Why’d you say you don’t know algebra?’ Tim asked, once. ‘I know you know even calculus and trig-something; you went to Stanford University.’

‘I want to show,’ he said, ‘that either they ought to kill all of us or none of us. But not divide along these bureaucratic arbitrary lines. “When does the soul enter the body?” What kind of rational question is that in this day and age? It’s Medieval.’ In fact, he thought, it’s a pretext - a pretext to prey on the helpless. And he was not helpless. The abortion truck had picked up a fully grown man, with all his knowledge, all his cunning. How are they going to handle me? he asked himself. Obviously I have what all men have; if they have souls, then so do I. If not, then I don’t, but on what real basis can they “put me to sleep”? I am not weak and small, not an ignorant child cowering defenselessly. I can argue the sophistries with the best of the county layers; with the DA himself, if necessary.

If they snuff me, he thought, they will have to snuff everyone, including themselves. And that is not what this is all about. This is a con game by which the established, those who already hold all the key economic and political posts, keep the youngsters out of it - murder them if necessary. There is, he thought, in the land, a hatred by the old of the young, a hatred and a fear. So what will they do with me? I am in their age group, and I am caged up in the back of this abortion truck. I pose, he thought, a different kind of threat; I am one of them but on the other side, with stray dogs and cats and babies and infants. Let them figure it out; let a new St Thomas Aquinas arise who can unravel this.

‘All I know,’ he said aloud, ‘is dividing and multiplying and subtracting. I’m even hazy on my fractions.’