The Overloaded Man
Faulkner was slowly going insane.
After breakfast he waited impatiently in the lounge while his wife tidied up in the kitchen. She would be gone within two or three minutes, but for some reason he always found the short wait each morning almost unbearable. As he drew the Venetian blinds and readied the reclining chair on the veranda he listened to Julia moving about efficiently. In the same strict sequence she stacked the cups and plates in the dishwasher, slid the pot roast for that evening’s dinner into the auto-cooker and selected the alarm, lowered the air-conditioner, refrigerator and immersion heater settings, switched open the oil storage manifolds for the delivery tanker that afternoon, and retracted her section of the garage door.
Faulkner followed the sequence with admiration, counting off each successive step as the dials clicked and snapped.
You ought to be in B-52’s, he thought, or in the control house of a petrochemicals plant. In fact Julia worked in the personnel section at the Clinic, and no doubt spent all day in the same whirl of efficiency, stabbing buttons marked ‘Jones’, ‘Smith’, and ‘Brown’, shunting paraplegics to the left, paranoids to the right.
She stepped into the lounge and came over to him, the standard executive product in brisk black suit and white blouse.
‘Aren’t you going to the school today?’ she asked.
Faulkner shook his head, played with some papers on the desk. ‘No, I’m still on creative reflection. Just for this week. Professor Harman thought I’d been taking too many classes and getting stale.’
She nodded, looking at him doubtfully. For three weeks now he had been lying around at home, dozing on the veranda, and she was beginning to get suspicious. Sooner or later, Faulkner realized, she would find out, but by then he hoped to be out of reach. He longed to tell her the truth, that two months ago he had resigned from his job as a lecturer at the Business School and had no intention of ever going back. She’d get a damn big surprise when she discovered they had almost expended his last pay cheque, might even have to put up with only one car. Let her work, he thought, she earns more than I did anyway.
With an effort Faulkner smiled at her. Get out! his mind screamed, but she still hovered around him indecisively.
‘What about your lunch? There’s no—’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Faulkner cut in quickly, watching the clock. ‘I gave up eating six months ago. You have lunch at the Clinic.’
Even talking to her had become an effort. He wished they could communicate by means of notes; had even bought two scribble pads for this purpose. However, he had never quite been able to suggest that she use hers, although he did leave messages around for her, on the pretext that his mind was so intellectually engaged that talking would break up his thought trains.
Oddly enough, the idea of leaving her never seriously occurred to him. Such an escape would prove nothing. Besides, he had an alternative plan.
‘You’ll be all right?’ she asked, still watching him warily.
‘Absolutely,’ Faulkner told her, maintaining the smile. It felt like a full day’s work.
Her kiss was quick and functional, like the automatic peck of some huge bottle-topping machine. The smile was still on his face as she reached the door. When she had gone he let it fade slowly, then found himself breathing again and gradually relaxed, letting the tension drain down through his arms and legs. For a few minutes he wandered blankly around the empty house, then made his way into the lounge again, ready to begin his serious work.
His programme usually followed the same course. First, from the centre drawer of his desk he took a small alarm clock, fitted with a battery and wrist strap. Sitting down on the veranda, he fastened the strap to his wrist, wound and set the clock and placed it on the table next to him, binding his arm to the chair so that there was no danger of dragging the clock onto the floor.
Ready now, he lay back and surveyed the scene in front of him.
Menninger Village, or the ‘Bin’ as it was known locally, had been built about ten years earlier as a self- contained housing unit for the graduate staff of the Clinic and their families. In all there were some sixty houses in the development, each designed to fit into a particular architectonic niche, preserving its own identity from within and at the same time merging into the organic unity of the whole development. The object of the architects, faced with the task of compressing a great number of small houses into a four-acre site, had been, firstly, to avoid producing a collection of identical hutches, as in most housing estates, and secondly, to provide a showpiece for a major psychiatric foundation which would serve as a model for the corporate living units of the future.
However, as everyone there had found out, living in the Bin was hell on earth. The architects had employed the socalled psycho-modular system — a basic L-design — and this meant that everything under-or overlapped everything else. The whole development was a sprawl of interlocking frosted glass, white rectangles and curves, at first glance exciting and abstract (Life magazine had done several glossy photographic treatments of the new ‘living trends’ suggested by the Village) but to the people within formless and visually exhausting. Most of the Clinic’s senior staff had soon taken off, and the Village was now rented to anyone who could be persuaded to live there.
Faulkner gazed out across the veranda, separating from the clutter of white geometric shapes the eight other houses he could see without moving his head. On his left, immediately adjacent, were the Penzils, with the McPhersons on the right; the other six houses were directly ahead, on the far side of a muddle of interlocking garden areas, abstract rat-runs divided by waist-high white panelling, glass angle-pieces and slatted screens.
In the Penzils’ garden was a collection of huge alphabet blocks, each three high, which their two children played with. Often they left messages out on the grass for Faulkner to read, sometimes obscene, at others merely gnomic and obscure. This morning’s came into the latter category. The blocks spelled out: STOP AND GO Speculating on the total significance of this statement, Faulkner let his mind relax, his eyes staring blankly at the houses. Gradually their already obscured outlines began to merge and fade, and the long balconies and ramps partly hidden by the intervening trees became disembodied forms, like gigantic geometric units.
Breathing slowly, Faulkner steadily closed his mind, then without any effort erased his awareness of the identity of the house opposite.
He was now looking at a cubist landscape, a collection of random white forms below a blue backdrop, across which several powdery green blurs moved slowly backwards and forwards. Idly, he wondered what these geometric forms really represented — he knew that only a few seconds earlier they had constituted an immediately familiar part of his everyday existence — but however he rearranged them spatially in his mind, or sought their associations, they still remained a random assembly of geometric forms.
He had discovered this talent only about three weeks ago. Balefully eyeing the silent television set in the lounge one Sunday morning, he had suddenly realized that he had so completely accepted and assimilated the physical form of the plastic cabinet that he could no longer remember its function. It had required a considerable mental effort to recover himself and re-identify it. Out of interest he had tried out the new talent on other objects, found that it was particularly successful with over-associated ones such as washing machines, cars and other consumer goods. Stripped of their accretions of sales slogans and status imperatives, their real claim to reality was so tenuous that it needed little mental effort to obliterate them altogether.
The effect was similar to that of mescaline and other hallucinogens, under whose influence the dents in a cushion became as vivid as the craters of the moon, the folds in a curtain the ripples in the waves of eternity.
During the following weeks Faulkner had experimented carefully, training his ability to operate the cut-out switches. The process was slow, but gradually he found himself able to eliminate larger and larger groups of objects, the massproduced furniture in the lounge, the over-enamelled gadgets in the kitchen, his car in the garage — de-identified, it sat in the half-light like an enormous vegetable marrow, flaccid and gleaming; trying to identify it had driven him almost out of his mind. ‘What on earth could it possibly be?’ he had asked himself helplessly, splitting his sides with laughter — and as the facility developed he had dimly perceived that here was an escape route from the intolerable world in which he found himself at the Village.
He had described the facility to Ross Hendricks, who lived a few houses away, also a lecturer at the Business School and Faulkner’s only close friend.
‘I may actually be stepping out of time,’ Faulkner speculated. ‘Without a time sense consciousness is difficult
