“Then you should have taken it like a good soldier, don’t you think? The majority rules.”
“But they went too far. If a little music and ‘keeping in touch’ was charming, they figured a lot would be ten times as charming. I went wild! I got home to find my wife hysterical. Why? Because she had been completely out of touch with me for half a day. Remember, I did a dance on my wrist radio? Well, that night I laid plans to murder my house.”
“Are you sure that’s how you want me to write it down?”
“That’s semantically (6) accurate. Kill it dead. It’s one of those talking, singing, humming, weather-reporting, poetry-reading, novel-reciting, jingle-jangling, rockaby-crooning- when-you-go-to-bed houses.
A house that screams opera to you in the shower and teaches you Spanish in your sleep. One of those blathering caves where all kinds of electronic Oracles make you feel a trifle larger than a thimble, with stoves that say, ‘I’m apricot pie, and I’m done,’ or ‘I’m prime roast beef, so baste me!’ and other nursery gibberish like that. With beds that rock you to sleep and shake you awake.
A house that barely tolerates humans, I tell you. A front door that barks: ‘You’ve mud on your feet, sir!’ And an electronic vacuum hound that snuffles around after you from room to room, inhaling every fingernail or ash you drop. . . .”
“Quietly,” suggested the psychiatrist.
“Remember that Gilbert and Sullivan song-‘I’ve Got It on My List, It Never Will Be Missed’? All night I listed grievances. Next morning early I bought a pistol. I purposely muddied my feet. I stood at our front door. The front door shrilled, ‘Dirty feet, muddy feet! Wipe your feet! Please be neat!’
I shot the damn thing in its keyhole! I ran to the kitchen, where the stove was just whining, ‘Turn me over!’ In the middle of a mechanical omelet I did the stove to death. Oh, how it sizzled and screamed, ‘I’m shorted!’ Then the telephone rang like a spoiled brat.
I shoved it down the Insinkerator. I must state here and now I have nothing whatever against the Insinkerator; it was an innocent bystander. I feel sorry for it now, a practical device indeed, which never said a word, purred like a sleepy lion most of the time, and digested our leftovers.
I’ll have it restored. Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa,(7) which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back, hoping and waiting until-bang! Like a headless turkey, gobbling, my wife whooped out the front door. The police came. Here I am!”
He sat back happily and lit a cigarette.
“And did you realize, in committing these crimes, that the wrist radio, the broadcasting transmitter, the phone, the bus radio, the office intercoms, all were rented or were someone else’s property?”
“I would do it all over again, so help me God.” The psychiatrist sat there in the sunshine of that beatific (8) smile.
“You don’t want any further help from the Office of Mental Health? You’re ready to take the consequences?”
“This is only the beginning,” said Mr. Brock. “I’m the vanguard (9) of the small public which is tired of noise and being taken advantage of and pushed around and yelled at, every moment music, every moment in touch with some voice somewhere, do this, do that, quick, quick, now here, now there. You’ll see. The revolt begins. My name will go down in history!”
“Mmm.” The psychiatrist seemed to be thinking.
“It’ll take time, of course. It was all so enchanting at first. The very idea of these things, the practical uses, was wonderful. They were almost toys, to be played with, but the people got too involved, went too far, and got wrapped up in a pattern of social behavior and couldn’t get out, couldn’t admit they were in, even.
So they rationalized their nerves as something else. ‘Our modern age,’ they said. ‘Conditions,’ they said. ‘High-strung,’ they said. But mark my words, the seed has been sown. I got world-wide coverage on TV, radio, films; there’s an irony for you.
That was five days ago. A billion people know about me. Check your financial columns. Any day now. Maybe today. Watch for a sudden spurt, a rise in sales for French chocolate ice cream!”
“I see,” said the psychiatrist.
“Can I go back to my nice private cell now, where I can be alone and quiet for six months?”
“Yes,” said the psychiatrist quietly.
“Don’t worry about me,” said Mr. Brock, rising. “I’m just going to sit around for a long time stuffing that nice soft bolt of quiet material in both ears.”
“Mmm,” said the psychiatrist, going to the door.
“Cheers,” said Mr. Brock.
“Yes,” said the psychiatrist.
He pressed a code signal on a hidden button, the door opened, he stepped out, the door shut and locked. Alone, he moved in the offices and corridors. The first twenty yards of his walk were accompanied by “Tambourine Chinois.”
Then it was “Tzigane,” Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in something Minor, “Tiger Rag,” “Love Is Like a Cigarette.” He took his broken wrist radio from his pocket like a dead praying mantis. He turned in at his office. A bell sounded; a voice came out of the ceiling, “Doctor?”
“Just finished with Brock,” said the psychiatrist.
“Diagnosis?”
“Seems completely disoriented, but convivial.(10) Refuses to accept the simplest realities of his environment and work with them.”
“Prognosis?”(11)
“Indefinite. Left him enjoying a piece of invisible material.”
Three phones rang. A duplicate wrist radio in his desk drawer buzzed like a wounded grasshopper. The intercom flashed a pink light and click-clicked. Three phones rang. The drawer buzzed. Music blew in through the open door.
The psychiatrist, humming quietly, fitted the new wrist radio to his wrist, flipped the intercom, talked a moment, picked up one telephone, talked, picked up another telephone, talked, picked up the third telephone, talked, touched the wrist-radio button, talked calmly and quietly, his face cool and serene, in the middle of the music and the lights flashing, the phones ringing again, and his hands moving, and his wrist radio buzzing, and the intercoms talking, and voices speaking from the ceiling.
And he went on quietly this way through the remainder of a cool, air-conditioned, and long afternoon; telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio . . .
The End
Note
1 a cathode-ray tube, used in television picture tubes
2 a company that made musical recordings for use as background music in such places as elevators and restaurants 3 something outstanding
4 a machine that is used for medical purposes and that produces a high-frequency electric current
5 a reference to triangulation, the process of locating something by means of taking measurements from two fixed points, as can be done with radio signals
6 in a manner that has to do with the meaning of words
7 in Greek mythology, a beautiful woman who was punished for loving a god by having her hair turned into snakes; after that, anyone who looked at her turned to stone
8 angelic
9 the leader of thought, taste, or opinion in a field 10 merry
11 a forecast of the probable course of a disease
