A Reasonable World

26

The Joy Boys were just a bunch of young guys who looked a little bit alike and had fun hanging around together in Miami Beach; they were tall, pretty well built, blond or bleached, no big noses or anything, blue- or grey-eyed. The uniform kind of evolved: they wore T-shirts with the arms cut off, wide blue-grey belts with big buckles that said JB, grey cutoffs in the summer and grey tightbottoms in the winter, and they always had twisted grey-blue headbands around their foreheads. The hair was crewcut to begin with, but then they started cutting it short in the middle and letting it grow longer on the sides. When they walked down the street, they got a lot of respect, and when they walked down the street together, they got a lot of respect.

Once in a while they got into shoving matches with some other gang, but everybody knew the days of brass knuckles and auto antennas were over, and they really weren’t into that anyway: it wasn’t a competitive thing, like proving they were meaner than anybody, they just enjoyed seeing the straights get off the sidewalk to let them by, or pushing them off if they didn’t. And then they would go into a bar and drink a lot of beer, and go home doing the same thing, or sometimes other things.

One afternoon five of them were walking down the street, Carter, Erv, Tim, Walker, and Mark. All in a row. And they nudged an old dentist type off the sidewalk into the gutter. Then a couple of tourists in Hawaiian shirts.

And Erv fell down, just facedown on the sidewalk, drooling on the concrete, his arms wide. And then a couple of seconds later Mark went down, just the same. The rest of them ran, but Walker went, and Carter, and only Tim got away.

His name was Raul Pacheco Quinones; he was thirty-five, a lawyer, a widower, a poet who never showed his verses to anyone. He thought of himself as essentially normal sexually, if perhaps a little more fastidious than most; his shyness prevented him from approaching any woman unless he felt a shared attraction . . . Well, anyhow, in his successful encounters he instinctively and naturally behaved in a caring way, solicitous of the woman and desiring her pleasure, and yet in his fantasies and in the kind of pornography he preferred, he thought obsessively of women stripped and compelled —not brutally raped, as a rule, but compelled to submit nevertheless, and moreover forced to respond against their will. And of course this was a sick fantasy, the rapist’s fantasy that the victim really likes it. Later he began to have other fantasies, in which he experienced the excitement of blood and dismemberment. In actual life he would never take part in such a thing, but he remembered that as a young boy he had had daydreams of this kind, of stripping and humiliating a certain woman teacher, for example—this was early, before he had even found out what men and women did with their sexual parts. And perhaps this sadistic motif came from that time, when he had felt sexually confused, ignorant and powerless, and wanted to retaliate by injuring a woman. Sometimes, with a metal fist, he wanted to strike his parents in the face with such power that it would drive them back against their parents and grandparents and knock them all down like trees felled by a hurricane.

In a suburb of Lima called Miraflores, where he had just finished lunch with a client, he was walking down a sunny street between whitewashed walls toward the holotheaters and the bus stop, looking at the people he passed. Here a woman in her thirties, face a little drooping and sad, and he thought of closing the door, the fright in her eyes, then the first slicing blow. He saw rich rolling intestines cascading out on the floor, blood spurting between fingers, grey intestines and yellow fat, all the forbidden interior; yes, and the closed eyes, the mouth straining open to scream its disbelief. That this could happen, that another human being could ...

He slipped out and into an elderly woman named Velasquez who was walking in the same direction. Come and look at this, please. Without pleasure.

. . . another slice, and the white bone before the blood covered it; then the hairy pubis parting . . . But he has never—? No. He knows he would die. Unusual. Let’s call a few others.

They rode him together into a bus, where he sat looking out the dusty window awhile, then took a pad from his breast pocket and wrote:

This ugliness is beautiful to him. True. And he harms no one.

Then why kill him?

Only to spare ourselves from having to see these things again?

Let him live.

What if he is unhappy?

He says his business as

a poet is to tell his own truth, even if it is bitter.

How can we know he is wrong?

All right. Good-bye. *Pop* *Pop* *Pop* *Pop*

Ralph W. Steinleser owned and operated an electronic parts manufacturing company in Cleveland, Ohio; he was a choleric man of fifty-six who had been disillusioned in love several times and whose doctor no longer allowed him to eat the foods he liked best. Lately he had noticed that the people in the office were giving him strange looks. The new head of his catalog department, Tom Eberhard, for instance. One morning Steinleser was saying to him, “I wouldn’t wipe my ass on a piece of junk like that. A kid nine years old could—” There was that look again. It wasn’t suppressed anger; he was used to that, and people who worked for him damn well had to suppress their anger; it was something else, almost like fear or, no, more like excitement.

“What’s the matter?” he said irritably.

Eberhard moistened his lips. “Nothing.”

“Come on, give for Chrissake. What are you, afraid to tell me? Come on, be a mentsh.”

“I’m just wondering how much longer you’ll be with us, Mr. Steinleser,” Eberhard said.

Steinleser looked at him. “You going to explain that or what?”

“If I do, you’ll fire me.”

Steinleser took a grip on himself. “I won’t fire you, okay? I swear on my mother’s grave.”

“Okay, you know Al Mahony over at Capitol Processing?”

“Know him? I knew him. He dropped dead last Wednesday.”

“Right, and so did Win Colford at World, and Rich Piotto at Hi-Тек, and three or four others that I know about. Not last Wednesday, but like the last six months or so.”

“And you think I might be next, huh?” Steinleser moved toward the door, turned around. “What did all those guys have in common, Eberhard? They were all sons of bitches, right, and I’m another one?”

Eberhard said nothing.

“You’re fired, ” Steinleser said. “No, the hell with it. You’re not fired. Maybe I’m going to give you a raise, who knows.” With an effort, he added, “Thanks.”

He went back to his own office, told the computer, “Pinky, hold my calls,” and leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed. Well, he was an SOB; he could afford to be one, and it came natural, so why not? “Pinky,” he said, “there was something on the news about rudeness, when was it, last week sometime.”

“Is this it?” In the holo, the head and shoulders of a local anchor appeared. “A new development in the story of McNulty’s Symbiont,” she said. “A wave of unexplained deaths in Eastern cities has a few scientists worried. Like earlier victims apparently killed by symbionts, they were mostly men between the ages of thirty-five and sixty, but unlike those earlier deaths, there is no evidence that they were about to commit any act of violence. They were, however, said to be extremely rude and overbearing persons, who made everyone around them miserable. In other news—”

“Yeah, that was it,” Steinleser said. “Any more?”

A well-known commentator appeared in the holo. “Here’s a new wrinkle,” he said. “A company called Feelsafe is marketing a gadget that fits on your wrist and buzzes you if you start to lose your temper. They point to the recent wave of deaths among middle-aged men, particularly those in management positions: These people, they say, dropped dead in the middle of tantrums because the McNulty’s Symbiont got them. Wear their gadget, they say, and live longer.” He leaned closer in the holo, with a conspiratorial smile. “How do you like them apples?”

“Enough,” said Steinleser. “Look up Feelsafe.”

A picture came up in the holo: a computer bracelet in two styles, silver and gold, the gold one a little broader. A voice was saying, “Feelsafe looks like an ordinary wrist computer, and actually has a full spectrum of functions, but in addition it is a sensitive biofeedback device that lets you know when you are about to give vent to anger and hostility. Feel safe and live longer.” The prices and order numbers were flashing.

“Enough,” he said. “That’s craziness.” He took a cigar out of the box on his desk, looked at it and put it back. Were they killing people for being rude, for Chrissake? But he more than half believed it, and he told the computer to order him a bracelet, the gold model, three hundred twenty-nine ninety-five.