still had fifteen minutes to run. She made him keep his exam-legally he couldn’t give it to her until the hour was up-so Richards leaned back and wordlessly ogled her nearly naked body. The silence grew thick and oppressive, charged. He could see her wishing for an overcoat and it pleased him.
When the time was up, she gave him a second exam. On the first page, there was a drawing of a gasoline carburetor. Below:
You would put this in a
a. lawnmower
b. Free-Vee
c. electric hammock
d. automobile
e. none of these
The third exam was a math diagnostic. He was not so good with figures and he began to sweat lightly as he saw the clock getting away from him. In the end, it was nearly a dead heat. He didn’t get a chance to finish the last question. Rinda Ward smiled a trifle too widely as she pulled the test and answer sheet away from him. “Not so fast on that one, Ben.”
“But they’ll all be right,” he said, and smiled back at her. He leaned forward and swatted her lightly on the rump. “Take a shower, kid. You done good.”
She blushed furiously. “I could have you disqualified.”
“Bullshit. You could get yourself fired, that’s all.”
“Get out. Get back in line.” She was snarling, suddenly near tears.
He felt something almost like compassion and choked it back. “You have a nice night tonight,” he said. “You go out and have a nice six-course meal with whoever you’re sleeping with this week and think about my kid dying of flu in a shitty threeroom Development apartment.”
He left her staring after him, white-faced.
His group of ten had been cut to six, and they trooped into the next room. It was one-thirty.
MINUS 091 AND COUNTING
The doctor sitting on the other side of the table in the small booth wore glasses with tiny thick lenses. He had a kind of nasty, pleased grin that reminded Richards of a half-wit he had known as a boy. The kid had enjoyed crouching under the high school bleachers and looking up girls’ skirts while he flogged his dog. Richards began to grin.
“Something pleasant?” the doctor asked, flipping up the first inkblot. The nasty grin widened the tiniest bit.
“Yes. You remind me of someone I used to know.”
“Oh? Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Very well. What do you see here?”
Richards looked at it. An inflated blood pressure cuff had been cinched to his right arm. A number of electrodes had been pasted to his head, and wires from both his head and arm were jacked into a console beside the doctor. Squiggly lines moved across the face of a computer console.
“Two Negro women. Kissing.”
He flipped up another one. “This?”
“A sports car. Looks like a Jag.”
“Do you like gascars?”
Richards shrugged. “I had a model collection when I was a kid.”
The doctor made a note and flipped up another card.
“Sick person. She’s lying on her side. The shadows on her face look like prison bars.”
“And this last one?”
Richards burst out laughing. “Looks like a pile of shit.” He thought of the doctor, complete with his white coat, conning around under the bleachers, looking up girls’ skirts and jacking off, and he began to laugh again. The doctor sat smiling his nasty smile, making the vision more real, thus funnier. At last his giggles tapered off to a snort or two. Richards hiccupped once and was still.
“I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me-”
“No,” Richards said. “I wouldn’t.”
“We’ll proceed then. Word association.” He didn’t bother to explain it. Richards supposed word was getting around. That was good; it would save time.
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
The doctor produced a stopwatch from an inside pocket, clicked the business end of his ballpoint pen, and considered a list in front of him.
“Doctor.”
“Nigger,” Richards responded.
“Penis.”
“Cock.”
“Red.”
“Black.”
“Silver.”
“Dagger.”
“Rifle.”
“Murder.”
“Win.”
“Money.”
“Sex.”
“Tests.”
“Strike.”
“Out.”
The list continued; they went through over fifty words before the doctor clicked the stem of the stopwatch down and dropped his pen. “Good,” he said. He folded his hands and looked at Richards seriously. “I have a final question, Ben. I won’t say that I’ll know a lie when I hear it, but the machine you’re hooked up to will give a very strong indication one way or the other. Have you decided to try for qualification status in the Games out of any suicidal motivation?”
“No.”
“What is your reason?”
“My little girl’s sick. She needs a doctor. Medicine. Hospital care.”
The ballpoint scratched. “Anything else?”
Richards was on the verge of saying no (it was none of their business) and then decided he would give it all. Perhaps because the doctor looked like that nearly forgotten dirty boy of his youth. Maybe only because it needed to be said once, to make it coalesce and take concrete shape, as things do when a man forces himself to translate unformed emotional reactions into spoken words.
“I haven’t had work for a long time. I want to work again, even if it’s only being the sucker-man in a loaded game. I want to work and support my family. I have pride. Do you have pride, Doctor?”
“It goes before a fall,” the doctor said. He clicked the tip of his ballpoint in. “If you have nothing to add, Mr. Richards-” He stood up. That, and the switch back to his surname, suggested that the interview was over whether Richards had any more to say or not.
“No.”
“The door is down the hall to your right. Good luck.
“Sure,” Richards said.
MINUS 090 AND COUNTING
The group Richards had come in with was now reduced to four. The new waiting room was much smaller, and the whole group had been reduced roughly by the same figure of sixty percent. The last of the Y’s and Z’s straggled in at four-thirty. At four, an orderly had circulated with a tray of tasteless sandwiches. Richards got two of them and sat munching, listening to a pal named Rettenmund as he regaled Richards and a few others with a seemingly inexhaustible fund of dirty stories.
When the whole group was together, they were shunted into an elevator and lifted to the fifth floor. Their quarters were made up of a large common room, a communal lavatory, and the inevitable sleep-factory with its rows of cots. They were informed that a cafeteria down the hall would serve a hot meal at seven o’clock.
Richards sat still for a few minutes, then got up and walked over to the cop stationed by the door they had come in through. “Is there a telephone, pal?” He didn’t expect they would be allowed to phone out, but the cop merely jerked his thumb toward the hall.
Richards pushed the door open a crack and peered out. Sure enough, there it was. Pay phone.
He looked at the cop again. “Listen, if you loan me fifty cents for the phone, I’ll-”
“Screw off, Jack.”
Richards held his temper. “I want to call my wife. Our kid is sick. Put yourself in my place, for Christ’s sake.”
The cop laughed: a short, chopping, ugly sound. “You types are all the same. A story for every day of the year. Technicolor and 3-D on Christmas and Mother’s Day.”
