The Simulacra

3

One would have to go back to the year 1994, the year that West Germany entered the Union as the fifty-third of the United States, to understand why Vince Strikerock, an American citizen and an inhabitant of The Abraham Lincoln Apartments, was listening to der Alte on the television set while he shaved, the next morning. There was something about this particular der Alte, President Rudi Kalbfleisch, which always irritated him, and it would be a great thing when Kalbfleisch, in two more years, reached the end of his term and had, by law, to retire. It was always a great thing, a good day, when the law got one of them out of office; Vince always found it worth celebrating.

None the less, Vince felt, it was best to do all that was possible with the old man while he remained in office, and so he put down his razor and went into the living room to fiddle with the knobs of the TV set. He adjusted the n, the r and b knobs, and hopefully anticipated a turn for the better in the dire droning on of the speech ... however, no change took place. Too many other viewers had their own ideas as to what the old man ought to be saying, Vince realized. In fact there were probably enough other people in this one apartment building alone to offset any pressures he might try to exert on the old man through his particular set. But anyhow that was democracy. Vince sighed. This was what they had wanted: a government receptive to what the people said. He returned to the bathroom and continued shaving.

‘Hey Julie!' he called to his wife. ‘Is breakfast about ready?' He heard no sound of her stirring about in the kitchen of the apartment. And come to think of it, he hadn't noticed her beside him in bed as he had groggily got up this morning.

All at once he remembered. Last night after All Souls he and Julie, after a particularly bitter fight, had got divorced, had gone down to the building's M & D Commissioner and filled out the D papers. Julie had packed her things then and there; he was alone in the apartment -- no one was fixing his breakfast and unless he got busy he would miss it entirely.

It was a shock, because this particular marriage had endured for six entire months and he had become thoroughly used to seeing her in the mornings. She knew just how he liked his eggs (cooked with a small amount of Mild Munster cheese). Damn the new permissive divorce legislation that old President Kalbfleisch had ushered in! Damn Kalbfleisch in general; why didn't the old man turn over and die some afternoon during his famous two o'clock nap? But then of course another der Alte would simply take his place. And even the old man's death wouldn't bring Julie back; that lay outside the area of USEA bureaucracy, vast as it was.

Savagely, he went to the TV set and pressed the s knob; if enough citizens pushed it, the old man would stop entirely the stop knob meant total cessation of the mumbling speech.

Vince waited, but the speech went on.

And then it struck him as odd that there should be a speech so early in the morning; after all, it was only eight a.m. Perhaps the entire lunar colony had gone up in a single titanic explosion of its fuel depot. The old man would be telling them that more belt-tightening was required, in order to restock the space programme; these and other quaint calamities had to be expected. Or perhaps at last some authentic remains of a sentient race had been unearthed -- or was the term unmarsed? -- on the fourth planet, hopefully not in the French area but in, as der Alte liked to phrase it, ‘one's own'. You Prussian bastards, Vince thought. We never should have admitted you into what I like to phrase as ‘our tent', our federal union, which should have been confined to the Western Hemisphere. But the world has shrunk. When you are founding a colony millions of miles away on another moon or planet, the three thousand miles separating New York from Berlin did not seem meaningful. And god knew the Germans in Berlin were willing.

Picking up the telephone, Vince called the manager of the apartment building. ‘My wife Julie -- I mean my ex-wife did she take another apartment last night?' If he could locate her he could perhaps have breakfast with her and that would be cheering. He listened hopefully.

‘No, Mr Strikerock.' A pause. ‘Not according to our records.'

Aw hell, Vince thought, and hung up.

What was marriage, anyhow? An arrangement of sharing things, such as right now being able to discuss the meaning of der Alte giving an eight a.m. speech and getting someone else -- his wife -- to fix breakfast while he prepared to go to his job at Karp u. Sohnen Werke's Detroit branch. Yes, it meant an arrangement in which one could get another person to do certain things one didn't like to do, such as cooking meals; he hated having to eat food which he had prepared himself. Single, he would eat at the building's cafeteria; he foresaw that, based on past experience. Mary, Jean, Laura, now Julie; four marriages and the last the shortest.

He was going downhill. Maybe, god forbid, he was a latent queer.

On the TV, der Alte uttered, ‘ ... and paramilitary activity recalls the Days of Barbarism and hence is doubly to be renounced.'

Days of Barbarism -- that was the sweet-talk for the Nazi Period of the middle part of the previous century, now gone nearly a century but still vividly, if distortedly, recalled. So der Alte had taken to the airwaves to denounce the Sons of Job, the latest nut organization of a quasi-religious nature flapping about in the streets, proclaiming a purification of national ethnic life, etc., or whatever it was they proclaimed.

In other words, stiff legislation to bar persons from public life who were odd -- those born specially, due to the years of radiation fall-out from bomb testing, in particular from the vicious People's China blasts.

That would mean Julie, Vince conjectured, since she's sterile. Because she could not bear children she would not be permitted to vote ... a rather neurotic connective, logically possible only in the minds of a Central European people such as the Germans. The tail that wags the dog, he said to himself as he dried his face. We in Nord Amerika are the dog; the Reich is the tail. What a life. Maybe I ought to emigrate to colonial reality, live under a faint, fitful, pale-yellow sun where even things with eight legs and a stinger get to vote ... no Sons of Job, there. Not that all the special people were that special, but a good many of them had seen fit -- and for good reason -- to emigrate. As had quite a number of quite unspecial folk who were simply tired of the overpopulated, bureaucratically-controlled life on Terra these days, whether in the USEA, in the French Empire, or in People's Asia, or Free -- that is, black -- Africa.

In the kitchen he fixed himself bacon and eggs. And, while the bacon cooked, he fed the sole pet allowed him in the apartment building: George III, his small green turtle.

George III ate dried flies (twenty-five per cent protein, more nourishing than human food), hamburger, and ant eggs, a breakfast which caused Vince Strikerock to ponder on the axiom de gustibus non disputandum est there's no accounting for other people's tastes, especially at eight in the morning.

Even as recently as five years ago he could have possessed a pet bird in The Abraham Lincoln, but that was now ruled out. Too noisy, really. Building Rule s205; thou shalt not whistle, sing, tweet or chirp. A turtle was mute -- as was a giraffe, but giraffes were verboten, too, along with the quondam friends of man, the dog and cat, the companions which had vanished back in the days of der Alte Frederich Hempel, whom Vince barely remembered. So it could not have been the quality of muteness, and he was left, as so often before, merely to guess at the reasoning of the Party bureaucracy. He could not genuinely fathom its motives, and in a sense for that he was glad. It proved that he was not spiritually a part of it.

On the TV the withered, elongated, near-senile face had vanished and a moment of music, a purely audible event, had replaced it. Percy Grainger, a tune called ‘Handel in the Strand', as banal as could be ... just the appropriate postscript to what had come before, Vince reflected. He clicked his heels abruptly, came to attention, in a parody of Germanic military stiffness, chin up, arms rigid, as the melody tinkled from the speaker of the TV set; Vince Strikerock at attention to this child's music which the authorities, the so-called Ges, saw fit to play. Heil, Vince said to himself, and raised his arm in the ancient Nazi salute.

The music tinkled on.

Vince turned to another channel.

And there, on the screen, a hounded-looking man fleetingly appeared in the midst of a crowd which seemed to be cheering him; the man, with what were obviously police on both sides of him, disappeared into a parked vehicle. At the same time the newscaster declared, ‘ ... and, just as in hundreds of other cities across the USEA, Dr Jack Dowling, leading psychiatrist of the Vienna School here in Bonn, is taken into custody as he protests the newly-signed-into-law bill, the McPhearson Act ... ‘

On the screen the vehicle, a marked police car, zipped away.

A hell of a note, Vince thought glumly. Sign of the times; more repressive, scared legislation by the establishment. So who am I going to get help from if Julie's departure causes me to break down mentally? As well it might. I've never consulted an analyst -- I've never needed to in my entire life.

But this ... nothing like this, precisely this bad, has ever happened to me. Julie, he thought, where are you? Now, on the TV screen, the scene changed, and yet it remained the same. Vince Strikerock saw a new crowd, different police, another psychoanalyst being led off; another protesting soul taken into custody.

‘It is interesting,' the TV set murmured, ‘to observe the loyalty of the analyst's patient. And yet, why not? This man has placed his faith in psychoanalysis possibly for years.'

And where did it get him? Vince wondered.

Julie, he said to himself, if you're with someone, some other man right now, there's going to be trouble. Either I'll drop dead -- either it will kill me outright -- or I'm going to give it to you and that individual, whoever he is. Even if, especially if, he's a friend of mine.

I'm going to get you back, he decided. My relationship with you is unique, not like that with Mary, Jean and Laura.

I love you; that's it. My god, he thought, I'm in love! And in this day and age. Incredible. If I told her, if she knew, she'd laugh her head off. That's Julie.

I should go to an analyst, he realized, for being in a state like this, for being totally psychologically dependent on a cold, selfish creature like Julie for existence itself. Hell, its unnatural. And -- it's folly.

Could Dr Jack Dowling, leading psychiatrist of the Vienna School in Bonn, Germany, cure me? Free me? Or this other man they're showing, this -- he listened to the newscaster, who droned on as the police vehicle drove away -- Egon Superb. He had looked like an intelligent, sympathetic person, gifted with the balm of empathetic understanding. Listen, Egon Superb, Vince thought, I'm in deep trouble; my tiny world collapsed this morning when I woke up. I need a woman whom I'll probably never see again.

A.G. Chemie's drugs can't help me with this ... except, perhaps, a mortal overdose. And that's not the sort of help I'm after.

Maybe I should roust out my brother Chic and both of us join the Sons of Job, he thought abruptly. Chic and I swear fealty to Bertold Goltz. Others have done so, other malcontents, others who have dismally failed, either in their private lives -- as I have -- or in business or in their social ascent from Be to Ge.

Chic and I Sons of Job, Vince Strikerock thought eerily.

In bizarre uniform, parading down the street. Being jeered at. And yet believing -- in what? In ultimate victory? In Goltz, who looks like a movie version of a Rattenfanger, a rat-catcher? He cringed from the notion; it frightened him.

And still the idea remained lodged in his mind.

In his apartment on the top of The Abraham Lincoln Apartments, thin, balding Chic Strikerock, Vince's older brother, awoke and peered nearsightedly at the clock to see if one could manage to remain in bed a bit longer. But the excuse was not valid; the clock read eight-fifteen. Time to get up ... a news machine, noisily vending its wares outside the building, had awakened him, fortunately. And then Chic discovered to his shock that someone was in bed with him; he opened his eyes fully and made himself rigid as he inspected the covered outline of what he saw at once, from the tumble of brown hair, was a young woman, and one familiar (that was a relief -- or was it?) to him. Julie! His sister-in-law, his brother Vince's wife. Good grief. Chic sat up.

Let's see, he said to himself rapidly. Last night -- what did go on here after All Souls, anyhow? Julie appeared, didn't she, distraught, with one suitcase and two coats and telling a disjointed story which boiled down to a simple fact, at last; she had broken up with Vince legally; she no longer had any official relationship to him and was free to come and go as she pleased. So here she was. Why? That part he couldn't remember; he had always liked Julie but -- it did not explain this; what she had done concerned her own secret, inner world of values and attitudes, not his, not anything that was objective, real.

Anyhow, here Julie was, still sound asleep, too, here physically but withdrawn into herself, curled up, retracted mollusc-like, which was just as well, because for him it all seemed incestuous, despite the clarity of the law in this variety of matter. She, to him, was more like family. He had never looked in her direction. But last night, after a few drinks -- that was it; he could not drink any more. Or rather he could, and when he did he underwent a rapid change for what at the time seemed like the better; he became outgoing, adventurous, extroverted, instead of morose and taciturn.

But here was a consequence. Look what he got involved in, here.

And yet on a very deep, private level he didn't object as much as all that. It was a compliment to him, her showing up here.

But it would be awkward, the next time he ran into Vince checking everyone's ID at the front door. Because Vince would want to discuss it on a profound, meaningful, sombre basis, with much intellectual hot air wasted in analysing basic motives. What was Julie's real purpose for leaving him and moving in here? Why? Ontological questions, such as Aristotle would have appreciated, teleological issues having to do with what they had once called ‘final causes'. Vince was out of step with the times; this had all become null and void.

I had better call my boss, Chic decided, and tell him -- ask him if -- I can be late today. Should settle this with Julie; what's up, and so forth. How long is she staying and is she going to help pay expenses. Basic unphilosophical questions of practical nature.

He fixed coffee in the kitchen, sat sipping, in his pyjamas.

Turning on the phone he punched his boss's number, Maury Frauenzimmer; the screen turned pale grey, then white, then cloudy as an out-of-focus portion of Maury's anatomy formed. Maury was shaving. ‘Yeah, Chic?'

‘Hey,' Chic said, and heard it sound forth proudly. ‘I got a girl here, Maury, so I'll be late.'

It was male-to-male business. Did not matter who the girl was; no need to go into that. Maury did not bother to ask; he showed on his face the involuntary, genuine admiration, then censure. But -- the admiration came first! Chic grinned; the censure did not bother him.

‘Goddam you,' Maury said, ‘you better get into the office by no later than nine.' His tone said: I wish I were you. I envy you, damn you.

‘Aw,' Chic said, ‘I'll be in, soon as I can.' He glanced towards the bedroom and Julie. She was sitting up. Perhaps Maury saw her. Perhaps not. In any case it was time to conclude the conversation. ‘So long Maury, old man,' Chic said. And rang off.

‘Who was that? Julie said sleepily. ‘Was that Vince?'

‘No. My boss.' Chic put on the coffee water for her.

‘Hi,' he said, walking back into the bedroom and seating himself on the bed beside her. ‘How are you?'

‘I forgot my comb,' Julie said, pragmatically.

‘I'll buy you one from the hall dispenser.'

‘Those measly little plastic things.'

‘Um,' he said, feeling fond of her, feeling sentimental. The situation, she in bed, he sitting beside her in his pyjamas -- it was a bittersweet situation, reminding him of his own previous last marriage of four months ago. ‘Hi,' he said, patting her on the thigh.

‘Aw god,' Julie said. ‘I wish I was dead.' She did not say it accusingly, as if it was his fault, or even as if she meant it passionately; it was as if she were resuming a conversation from the night before. ‘What is the purpose of it all, Chic?' she said. ‘I like Vince, but he's so goofy; he'll never grow up and really bear down at the business of living. He's always playing his games of being the embodiment of modern organized social life, the estab-man, pure and simple, whereas actually he's not. But he's young.' She sighed. It was a sigh that chilled Chic because it was a cold, cruel, utterly dismissing sigh. She was writing off another human being, severing herself from Vince with as little spilled emotion as if she had returned a book borrowed from the building's library.

Good grief, Chic thought, this man was your husband.

You were in love with him. You slept with him, lived with him, knew all there was to know about him -- in fact knew him better than I can, and he's been my brother for longer than you've been alive. Women down underneath, he thought, are tough. Terribly tough.

‘I, uh, have to get to work,' Chic said, nervously.

‘Is that coffee you have on for me, in there?'

‘Oh yeah. Sure!'

‘Bring it here, then, will you, Chic?'

He went to get the coffee, while she dressed.

‘Did old Kalbfleisch make his speech this morning?' Julie asked.

‘I dunno.' It hadn't occurred to him to turn on the TV, although he had read in the paper last night that the speech was due. He didn't give a damn what the old man had to say, about anything.

‘Do you really have to trot off to your little company and go to work?' She eyed him steadily and he saw, for what perhaps was the first time in his life, that she had lovely natural colour in her eyes, a polished slab texture of rock-smoothness and brilliance that needed the natural daylight for it to be brought out. She had, too, an odd, square jaw and a slightly large mouth with a tendency to turn down, tragedy-mask like, with her lips unnaturally red and lush, drawing attention away from her rather drably-coloured hair. She had a nice figure, rounded, pleasant, and she dressed well; that is, she looked splendid in whatever she wore. Clothes seemed to fit her, even mass-produced cotton dresses that other women would have difficulty with. Now she stood wearing the same olive-coloured dress with round black buttons which she had worn the night before, a cheap dress, really, and yet in it she looked elegant; there was no other word for it. She had an aristocratic carriage and bone-structure. It showed her jaw, her nose, her excellent teeth. She was not German but she was Nordic, perhaps Swedish or Danish. He thought, as he glanced at her, that she looked fine.

It seemed to him certain that she would hold together well over the years, not deteriorate; she seemed to be unbreakable. He could not imagine her getting sloppy or fat or dull.

‘I'm hungry,' Julie said.

‘You mean you want me to fix breakfast.' He perceived that; no doubt, there.

‘I've fixed all the breakfasts I'm going to fix for any man, you or your dumb kid brother,' Julie said.

Again he experienced fear. She was being too harsh, too soon; he knew her, knew she was this way -- but couldn't it be glossed over, at least for a while? Was she going to bring to him whatever her last mood with Vince had been? Wasn't there going to be a honeymoon? I think I'm in trouble, he thought to himself. I've got hold of just too much here; I'm not up to it. God, maybe she'll move on; I hope so. It was a childish hope, very regressive, not grown-up, masculine. No real man ever felt this way, he realized that.

‘I'll fix breakfast,' he said, and went into the kitchen to do so. Julie stood at the bedroom mirror, combing her hair.

Curtly, in his usual brisk tone, Garth McRae said, ‘Shut it off.' The Kalbfleisch simulacrum stopped. Its arms struck out rigid in their final gesture, the withered face vacuous. The simulacrum said nothing and automatically the TV cameras also shut off, one by one; there was no longer anything for them to transmit, and the technicians behind them, all of them Ges, knew it. They looked to Garth McRae.

‘We got the message across,' McRae informed Anton Karp.

‘Well done,' Karp said. ‘This Bertold Goltz, this Sons of Job man, makes me nervous; I think the speech here now this morning will dispel a little of that, my legitimate fear.'

He glanced timidly at McRae for confirmation, as did the others in the control room, the simulacrum engineers from the Karp Werke.

‘This is only the start,' McRae said presently.

‘True,' Karp agreed, nodding. ‘But a good start.' Walking up to the Kalbfleisch simulacrum he touched it gingerly on the shoulder, as if expecting it, prodded, to resume its activity. It did not.

McRae laughed.

‘I wish,' Anton Karp said, ‘that it had mentioned Adolf Hitler; you know, comparing the Sons of Job to the Nazis more directly, comparing Goltz to Hitler.'

‘But,' McRae said, ‘that would not have helped. True as it may be. You're not authentically a political person, Karp; what gives you the idea that ‘the truth' is the best story to stick to? If we want to stop Bertold Goltz we don't want to identify him as another Hitler simply because in their secret hearts fifty-one per cent of the local population would like to see another Hitler.' He smiled at Karp, who looked worried, who looked, in fact, tremulous and apprehensive.

‘What I want to know,' Karp said, ‘is this: is Kalbfleisch going to be able to handle the Sons of Job? You have von Lessinger equipment; tell me.'

‘No,' McRae said. ‘He won't be able to.'

Karp gaped at him.

‘But,' McRae said, ‘Kalbfleisch is going to go. Soon. Within the next month.' He did not say what Karp at once wanted him to say, what Anton and Felix Karp and the entire Karp Werke instinctively inquired into as a first reflex, an immediate query of primary magnitude.

Will we build the next simulacrum? Karp would have asked, had he dared, but he was afraid to speak. Karp was, as McRae knew, a coward. His integrity had long ago been emasculated in order that he be capable of functioning properly within the German business community; spiritual -- moral emasculation was a present day prerequisite for participation in the Ge class, in the ruling circles.

I could tell him, McRae thought. Ease his pain. But why? He did not like Karp, who had built and now maintained the simulacrum, kept it functioning as it had to function -- without even a trace of hesitation. Any failure would have betrayed to the Bes the secret, the Geheimnis, which distinguished the elite, the establishment of the United States of Europe and America; their possession of the one or more secrets made them into Geheimnistrager, bearers of the secret, rather than Befehltrager, mere carry-outer of instructions.

But all this to McRae was Germanic mysticism; he preferred to think of it in simple practical terms. Karp u.

Sohnen Werke was capable of building simulacra, had as an example built Kalbfleisch and done a good job of it, as well as a good job of maintaining this der Alte during his reign. However, another firm would construct the next der Alte equally well, and by eradicating the economic ties with Karp, the government cut the vast cartel out of participation in the economic privileges which it now enjoyed ... to the government's loss.

The next firm which built a simulacrum for the government of the USEA would be a small firm, one which the authorities could control.

The name which came to McRae's mind was Frauenzimmer Associates, an extremely small, marginal firm barely surviving in the field of sun-con: simulacra construction for planetary colonization.

He did not tell Anton Karp this, but he intended to open business discussions with Maurice Frauenzimmer, the head of the firm, any day now. And it would surprise Frauenzimmer, too; he did not know either.

Karp said thoughtfully, eyeing McRae, ‘What do you think Nicole will say?'

Smiling, McRae said, ‘I think she'll be glad. She never really liked old Rudi.'

‘I thought she did.' Karp looked chagrined.

‘The First Lady,' McRae said acidly, ‘has never liked a der Alte yet. Why should she? After all ... she's twenty-three and Kalbfleisch was, according to our informational poop-sheets, seventy-eight.'

Karp bleated, ‘But what does she have to do with him? Nothing. Just appear at a reception very seldom, just every now and then!'

‘I think that Nicole in general detests the old, the outworn, the useless,' McRae said, not sparing Anton Karp; he saw the middle-aged businessman wince. ‘That is a good shorthand description of your chief product,' he added.

‘But the specifications -- ‘

‘You could have made it a trifle more -- ‘ McRae searched for the word, ‘fascinating.'

‘Enough,' Karp said, flushing, knowing now that McRae was merely tormenting him, that all this was simply to drive home the point that as large and powerful as it was, Karp u. Sohnen Werke was a servant, only an employee, of the government; it did not really influence it, and even McRae, who was simply an Assistant Secretary of State, could take a stand of this sort with impunity.

‘If you ran things once more,' McRae drawled reflectively, ‘how would you alter matters? Go back to hiring concentration camp victims, as Krupp did during the twentieth century? Perhaps you could obtain and use von Lessinger equipment for that ... letting them die even faster, as your employees, than they died at Belsen-Belsen -- ‘

Karp turned and strode off. He was trembling.

Grinning, McRae lit a cigar. An American, not a German-Dutch, variety.