Roderick shook his head. ‘What I don’t see is why it mattered so much. What’s so great about space?’
‘Let’s have another drink and I’ll tell you. Barkeep?’
Roderick saw a familiar face at the end of the bar. Or was it familiar? Just some man with oily black hair, tinted glasses, and a tweed overcoat. He was talking to a pretty, doll-like little woman in a black fur coat — they both looked a little overdressed for Skid Row — telling her jokes, evidently. Every now and then she’d let out a little squeak of laughter and say, ‘Oh Felix, you are the limit! The limit!’
Luke was saying, ‘Why did I want to be an astronaut? I used to ask myself that, you know. But then when I’d get home after a hard day faking lab experiments, and the kids would be yelling and the wife would refuse to iron my socks and make a big scene about it — then you know, I realized why I liked space. It’s because you’re alone out there. No one wants a bedtime story. No one wants you to drop off clothes at the cleaners on your way home. Oh don’t get me wrong, I love my wife. I love my kids. I love my dog and my television set and all my neighbours and fellow countrymen and everybody else, but I still like to be alone, once in a while. In space. You know like in that poem, “The world’s a fine and private place”.’
Roderick said, ‘I thought it was the grave that was a fine and private place.’
‘Okay never mind that. The point is, I got into space finally, and instead of being alone, it was just the opposite. Two guys in the damned space shuttle with you, and Mission Control in there too — I mean right inside your damned suit. You eat a ham sandwich, this voice in your ear says, “Nice going, Luke. Hope you enjoy the ham sandwich, because your blood sugar level can use it.” You take a piss and they know exactly how much, what’s in it, the pH and albumin level, everything. You take a walk on the damned moon, they check your heart rate and tell you you’re lookin’ good, just gotta remind you they’re watching every move.’
‘I think I see what you mean.’
Luke laughed. ‘They see it, too. They see everything I ever did mean and ever will mean! Well, you get back and they have to debrief you, that means a lot more talk about how well they’ve been watching you. Then come the awards and shaking hands with the President and banquets and more awards and parades and crowds, crowds everywhere, even if you get a minute alone in your hotel room if you turn on TV there you are, eating that ham sandwich again, the world is not a fine and private place at all.’
Roderick studied the oddly familiar stranger again. He had a long jaw, and the skin of his face seemed dull in the glaring lights of the Tik Tok Club — powdered? The only really familiar feature of that long, empty face was the pair of tinted glasses. Who did they remind him of? No one.
‘That’s not the worst, the publicity’s not the worst. The worst is when it’s over,’ said Luke. ‘Because then you go home and it seems good to be home, the wife and kids seem terrific after the others. So you relax, have a few beers, watch an old movie on TV with the wife, go to bed. You find yourself getting a hard-on, and just as you’re about to nudge the wife, a little voice in your ear says, “Nice going, Luke. Good idea to have sex with your missus, only watch the old pulse rate. You’re lookin’ good.” It’s old Mission Control, still with me! Still there! Still watching! The hard-on naturally vanishes.
‘And Christ, they been with me ever since, watching every move and passing little palsy-walsy remarks on everything I do. I went to a Corps doctor and asked him, was it possible they’d planted some kind of device on me? Some video-radio device on me or even in me? He sent me to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist had me thrown out of the Corps.’
Felix of the tinted glasses told the woman in black fur one last joke as they left. Tired of slumming. Tinted glass, tinted glass.
‘I thought when I left the Corps it would all stop. But no, not a chance: once they get you, they get you for life. Every time I so much as farted, Mission Control would tell me what a great idea it was to vent that gas buildup.
‘Well naturally that wrecked my happy marriage. What kind of wife can put up with that, her husband gets ready to make love and then suddenly says “Affirmative, Mission Control” and gets a tired cock? And the kids, too, I’d be reading them a bedtime story when Mission Control would come on the line, asking was I sure I read that last paragraph right, and would I say again?’
Again Roderick said to himself, tinted glass, through a glass darkly but then face to long empty face — of course, it was the gold-haired stranger! Of course with the hair dyed, a different pair of tinted glasses — but no disguising the empty grin, the long empty face that, once the pocks were puttied up, had nothing in it.
‘Excuse me,’ said Roderick to the bartender. ‘That couple who just left, woman in fur, man in tinted glasses? Do you know them? Know where they went?’
‘Nope. Why.’
Roderick ran to the door and out on the corner. There were empty streets stretching away in four directions, no human to be seen, nothing but a wind-blown page of newspaper.
Roderick went back to the bar. ‘Thought I saw someone I knew… probably wrong. Go on. About your voices.’
‘Go on?
‘And they’re still with you, right now?’
‘Affirmative. Saying it’s a good story but nobody’d believe it and that I’ve had enough ethanol. Time to leave.’
‘A little voice in your ear,’ Roderick said. ‘Sounds kind of like a conscience.’
‘It is a conscience. Correct and confirmed, it is a damned conscience. That’s why I keep messing around with religion and politics. I need to find some way to get rid of this conscience. To exorcize it. I mean hell, millions of people get along without consciences, why should I get stuck? I mean Nixon did what he wanted to, right? So why me? Why me?’
Roderick knew no answer. Which was unfortunate, because Luke was getting loud and defiant.
‘I won’t put up with it!’ he yelled. ‘You hear that, Mission Control? I won’t put up with it! I’ll find some kind of religion that will shut your still small trap for good! Or politics — I’ll start a goddamned revolution that will burn Houston to the ground!’
The bartender approached. ‘Get your friend outa here. Maybe we ain’t a high-class joint, but we got our limit. He controls himself now, or out.’
‘Over and out,’ murmured Luke, as Roderick helped him from the bar. ‘Your friend doesn’t control himself, Rickwood, because they control him. He’s not even human, just a radio-controlled model astronaut. Mission Control says I’m not walking too straight. Am I?’
‘That depends on where you want to go.’
‘Gert’s Cafe, where else? The address is on this.’ Luke fumbled in all his pockets and came up with a handbill printed in red:
NO to Fascist prison atrocities, extermination of dissidents and tortured confessions!
NO to Marxist-Leninist mindless bureaucracies grinding down the disaffected in slave labour camps!
NO to Capitalist corporate corruption, conglomerate exploitation of the workers and rape of the Third World!
NO to Maoist robotocracy, smashing individualism under mind-bending, brain-washing statism!
NO to the so-called New Left and other effete dilettante so-called movements drowning in their own so- called rhetoric!
NO to Anarchism, Trotskyism, Democracy and all other useless isms and ocracies!
Well and why shouldn’t 1141 Richelieu Ave. So. turn out to be an ordinary frame house in a slightly rundown neighbourhood? Why shouldn’t it be allowed to have a small sign on the front lawn: GERTS CAFE. KEEP OUT. THIS
