The Complete Roderick

take it from there either.’

‘I’ve heard that before,’ she said, plumping a cushion. ‘But you’d be surprised what you can do when you get in the mood.’

Roderick sat down and let the Persian rub its head against his shins. ‘Look, maybe I’d better explain: I’m a robot.’

‘Yeah? That’s what all these crazy kids say, nowadays.’ After pouring herself a drink, she sat next to him. ‘I thought you had more sense, Rod.’

‘No, I mean a real robot. I’m full of wires and stuff. Honest.’

Ida tasted her drink and frowned. ‘Sure, kid. Anything you want. Only I hope robots don’t like beating up on women or nothing like that. I’m not so good at that scene.’

‘Beating up on — I thought they only did that in the movies! No, heck Ida, I didn’t mean I want anything special, anything freaky. I meant I don’t like anything at all.’

‘Okay but if you did like something, what would it be?’

‘I don’t know, something like — well, like love. I guess.’

‘Roderick, there has to be a first time for everybody. And I’m a pretty good teacher, if I say so myself. There ain’t much I haven’t seen, done, had done to me, smelled, tasted, dressed up as, sat on or listened to. I could tell you some stories — only they might scare you off.’

He said nothing while she had two more drinks and fiddled with the tassels on a cushion.

‘Well, for instance some guys get turned on by just a fabric, rubber or leather or silk or even cotton. One guy had to be hanged in a telephone booth while a woman wearing yellow cotton gloves — me — pounded on the door. Another guy used to wear cotton long johns with the flap down, and I had to pretend to be scared while he whipped me with a piece of cotton string, I had to call him King Cotton. Then there was the gingham guy. He would sit at the kitchen table just like in the ads and I would come in wearing nothing but a gingham apron to pour milk on his cereal Then he’d listen to it, while yours truly got under the table to make him snap, crackle and pop. That’s to mention only cotton.’

She went on to describe strange rituals called golden showers, dog shows, thundermug brunches, Leslie Fiedler croquet; scenes involving coffins, chains, ice sculpture, lecterns, skates, trusses, apricot jam, the recorded cries of whales, pool tables, confetti, door chimes, Worcestershire sauce, early photos of Stalin, voodoo dolls, thimbles, mukluks, croziers, castanets, documentary films on the cement industry, whoopee cushions.

‘…and I knew this FBI special agent, boy was he ever special. We always started off me whipping him with a towel from the Moscow YWCA while he sings about Notre Dame marching on to victory, then another girl comes in — we’re in the bathroom — and handcuffs him to the faucets and washes his mouth out with soap while he studies pictures of Whitaker Chambers and Jean-Paul Sartre. Then I had to barge in wearing a J. Edgar Hoover mask and release him but only so’s we could put him under a hot light and I ask him to name all the state capitals while she dusts off his cock for fingerprints. Then at the last minute a third girl rushes in and hands him a writ of habeas corpus. Boy, we earned our money in them days. And we always had to be careful with that guy’s face because he’d always just finished getting a face-lift. So listen, kid, you ain’t got no problem I can’t handle unless maybe you like boys.’ She put a hand on his leg and slid it towards his crotch. ‘Tell me all about your problem, Rod. You got a wooden leg here, that it? You shy?’

Roderick stood up. ‘Maybe if I just undressed and showed you—?’

She nodded. ‘I won’t be shocked. I — holy cow!’

Roderick stepped out of his dropped trousers and then took off his shirt. ‘See, I am a little different.’

‘Different, I’ll say. Turn around, will you? Jeez, no asshole either. And you, what’s that in your belly button, looks like an electric socket or—’

‘It is an electric socket. It’s how I recharge. Like I said, Ida, I’m a real robot.’

‘I believe you, I believe you.’ She poured another drink and gulped it down. ‘So there’s nothing I can do for you?’

‘If I could stay overnight and charge my batteries, I guess that’s all.’

After another, very large drink, Ida said, ‘A robot. Does that mean you got no feelings at all?’

‘I’ve got some feelings.’ He thought about it. ‘It’s just that I can’t do much about them.’

‘It’s a challenge, all right.’ Ida seemed to be talking to herself. ‘A real challenge. Okay you recharge tonight, I’ll get some shuteye. In the morning when I’m soberer, I’ll think about this problem of yours some more. See, the way I look at it, nobody with feelings oughta go around not being able to let ’em out, all frustrated and ornery. Okay, so what if you got no ordinary sex equipment — sex is all in the mind anyway.’

Someone had said that before to Roderick, long before. Pa Wood, was it? (But Pa was always saying things: sex is all in the head. History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken…)

‘Machines,’ said Indica Dinks, ‘are only human, after all.’

The audience laughed, then applauded.

The host, Mel Mason, said, ‘I love it! I don’t understand it, but I love it!’ After more applause, he said, ‘But seriously now, Indica, isn’t this Machines Lib idea just a little — wacky? I mean, do you really expect everybody to just turn their machines loose? I’d hate to be in the front yard when somebody liberates a big power mower!’

Indica smiled just enough to show she recognized the joke, but did not join in the audience laughter. When it had abated, she said quietly, ‘We don’t expect people to stop using their machines, of course not. We just want people to understand the machines they use, to understand and respect them. If you don’t have respect for your own car, your own home computer, how can you have any respect for yourself?’

‘Well, that’s a very interesting point, Indica, we can know a man by the gadgets he keeps.’

She cut off the hesitant laughter. ‘Yes, by the machines he keeps and by how he keeps them. Mel, machines aren’t just extensions of man, that’s all part of the old master-slave routine, the terrible power game we used to play, all of us. But I think we’re moving on into a new era, as machines get smarter and smarter. They may go on working for us, but not as slaves. As employees. As I say in my new book, THE NUTS AND BOLTS ON MACHINES LIB, machines are beings in their own right. And if we don’t give them their freedom, one of these days, they’ll take it.’

‘Well, you’ve given us big food for thought there, Indica, thanks very much. Stick around folks, later we’ll be talking to lots more exciting people: a sculptor who wants us all to get plastered, the President’s astrologer, the most beautiful private eye in Hollywood, and the exiled Shah of Ruritania, you saw it all first on the Mel Mason Afternoon Show…’

Roderick watched the pictures of an armpit, then dancing cornflakes, then a shirt destroyed by lightning. Indica Dinks had been his first mother, long ago… in another life… he could hardly remember. Indica painting her toenails red. A green plant in a pot. Hank and Indica. An exercise machine. A TV cartoon called Suffering Cats…

He went back in the kitchen where Ida was fixing her face for evening. They had spent the whole day talking, trying things; Ida had heard his life history and how he functioned. But nothing had transpired.

‘Okay, so you saw your old stepmother on TV, that upset you at all? Turn you on?’

‘Nope. I hardly remember Indica, all I did as a kid was watch TV, how could I be upset? How could I get turned on?’

‘That’s the big question, Rod. How can you get turned on? Do I remind you of your stepmother? I mean I’m older, kind of motherly. And my name, Ida, that’s a lot like Indica.’

He slumped down in his chair. The afternoon sun slanted in through the window and reflected from Ida’s compact mirror into his eyes. Squinting against it, he said: ‘Everything’s like something and everybody’s like somebody, that doesn’t mean much. Like all TV programmes have a car crash in the first five minutes, what does that mean? Gee, Ida, I guess all your hard work goes for nothing, you been swell but what’s the poi — the poi — the — the—’

‘Hey, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ he said after a moment. ‘Just the light, the way it flashes in one eye and then the other. It’s real