and finally burned her to death, but the boys defended him and he got a suspended sentence; I guess I should be proud of my boys. Anyway, here I am fifty years old, my life doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Do you think I need a lobotomy?’
‘I wouldn’t rush into anything,’ Roderick said. ‘Talk it over with someone like Mr Multifid.’
‘Talk?’ she said, as she tip-toed to the door. ‘What good is talk?’
A young couple named Ferguson came in as soon as she’d left. Roderick explained to them that he was only a client himself, that the counsellor was out.
Mr Ferguson stood up to leave.
‘Oh sure, leave,’ said Mrs Ferguson. ‘Any excuse to leave.’
‘
The Fergusons sat glaring at one another in silence for an hour, then left together.
Next came a young man with an irritating nervous laugh, who called himself Norm.
‘Gene’s out, huh? Well it doesn’t matter much, I just stopped by on the chance that he might be here and might have a spare minute to see me. Thing is I need to kind of build up some confidence. Because I’m going to this, this party, uh-uh-uh! So what I need is this real confident manner so I can pick up a girl and score, you know? What I need are a few snappy lines, you know, like opening gambits and subtle ploys and sophisticated tricks that girls always fall for, right up to a fool-proof closing line that makes them, like, fall right into bed then and there — what I need is this I guess complete guaranteed seduction technique, uh-uh-uh!’
Roderick said, ‘I can’t give you any real advice, but I’ll tell you one thing, not many girls I bet want to fall into bed with a guy who keeps laughing like that, it sounds like whooping cough. If I were you I’d try to drop the laugh.’
‘Hey great! I bet you could give me lots of hints like that, huh? Hey, could you come along to this party and sort of, sort of advise me?’
XI
The houses on this street had elaborate Christmas decorations — Santas in sleighs, giant Rudolphs or angels — outlined in lights or sometimes floodlit. There were giant conifers dripping with diamond lights.
‘Always drive through this way,’ Norm said. ‘It takes longer but I like to see the lights.’
They came to a dark stretch, where the snowbanks alongside the road were high and there were no houses. Norm pulled over and stopped the car. ‘Uh-uh-uh, those lights always remind me of pocket calculators, you know?’
‘Yes, but why are we stopping here?’
‘I uh want you to do me a favour, Rod.’ Norm held up a pocket calculator. ‘Just a little favour.’
‘Look, what is this?’
Norm was holding an automatic in his other hand. ‘Just a goddamned favour, you son of a bitch — you can’t get out of the car on account of the snowbank anyway, so take the fucking calculator!’
Roderick took it. ‘What now?’
‘Now you just punch the numbers I give you and let me see the display.’
‘What, like this?’ Roderick punched 12345 and held up the calculator. The red digits glowed like cigarettes. Roderick was afraid of dying.
‘No no no! Hold it so it’s upside down for me. Okay now the first number is 58008, you got that?’
Roderick punched it. ‘I see, it’s spelling out words for you.’
Norm ordered him to spell out in turn: SOIL, SISSIES, SOB, SOLOS, LOSSES, BOSS, BOOHOO, LOOSE, HOLE, LIBEL, BOILS, BLOJOBS, BOOBIES and finally OHOHOH.
There was a moment of silence, during which Norm sat doubled over behind the steering wheel. Then he sat up and said, ‘Okay thanks. I’m sorry I pulled a gun on you, I just got worried you wouldn’t do it. A lotta people laugh when I ask them.’ He started the car. ‘I’ll drop you off wherever…’
‘What about this party you wanted to score at?’
‘Well there is a party. In the suburbs, you really want to go?’
As they drove on, Roderick asked Norm how he had developed his curious hobby.
‘Hobby’ I guess it is. Well I guess it all started when I was about ten. Dad gave me this pocket calculator, you know? And I really liked it. I um had fun just multiplying two times two, stuff like that. I mean calculating gave me this special feeling.’
‘What feeling?’
‘Okay, okay, it gave me a hard-on, calculating gave me a hard-on. I was only ten, didn’t hardly know — okay maybe I did know but it didn’t seem so wrong. I mean I just kept the thing in my pants pocket and um worked out a few things in secret now and then. I used to pretend it was the real thing.’
‘A woman, Norm?’
‘No, a
‘What happened then?’
Norm stopped for a red light. A drunken man was feeling his way across the street, trying to get into one car, then another, shouting at their occupants.
‘Well, Dad caught me once. He said I’d go blind and lose strength from all the calculating, but I didn’t care. I had to go on adding, subtracting… even when we played sandlot baseball I had to stop all the time and work out my batting average. And pretty soon I stopped playing any games at all, I just, you know?
‘So then when I was about fifteen I started hanging out in the crummy part of town, I started running errands for this bookie. And he had this, well this older computer, she’d been through a lot of weird programs, stuff I’d never dreamed of I mean she really taught me a lot. I learned so much I figured I was cured, you know? When we broke up I figured I was burnt out and cured.
‘So I went away to college, got along okay only I couldn’t help noticing computers. Like the freshman registration computer, she was big. Dumb, but really big, you know? Meanwhile I met this really nice girl, a real girl, and we got engaged. We were gonna marry after graduation.
‘Graduation night there was a big party and I got real drunk, and somehow we all ended up at this computer dating agency. So the others are standing there filling out forms and giggling, and the girl behind the counter goes out of the room for something — and there I am, face to face with a big beautiful machine! In about one second flat I’m over that counter and all over her.’
‘How did you feel, Norm?’
‘Good at first, and then — disgusted. Couldn’t wait to pay my money and get out of there. Goes without saying my engagement was off, all my friends aghast — but I knew then I was hooked, I knew I’d be back! And I was, again and again, until they had to call the cops to get rid of me. Then I started hanging around electronics stores — you ever notice how they always have them on the same streets with sex stores and porno palaces and massage parlours? Ever notice that? The cops would pick me up routinely about once a week. Most of the time they just took me home to Dad.’
‘You didn’t go to jail?’
‘No, because Dad offered to send me for some therapy. We um tried aversion. I went to this guy Dr George. He would show me a picture of a big Univac say, or hand me a magnetic card, or a reel of tape or something, and at the same time he’d give me this electric shock. Trouble is, you can get to like a jolt of current now and then, you can get a special feeling there too.’
Roderick decided to say nothing of his own identity as a cybernetic machine running on electricity.
At the next traffic light they stopped. A group of children trooped across the street, with two adults in charge. Roderick noticed that the little boys had crepe paper beards and the little girls carried stiff styrofoam wings.
‘Norm, I notice you don’t mention your mother much.’
‘Mother?’ Norm frowned. ‘What do you mean, exactly?’
‘Well you had a mother, didn’t you?’
‘Jesus, whose life are we supposed to be talking about, anyway? I mean excuse me, but I thought it was
