The moral aspect was merely a concomitant, a coverall for some deeper, almost forgotten purpose. That histoire should be story, lie and history all in one, was of a significance not to be despised. And that a story, given out as the invention of a creative artist, should be regarded as the most effective material for getting at the truth about its author, was also significant. Lies can only be imbedded in truth. They have no separate existence; they have a symbiotic relationship with truth. A good lie reveals more than the truth can ever reveal. To the one, that is, who seeks truth. To such a person there could never be cause for anger or recrimination when confronted with the lie. Not even pain, because all would be patent, naked and revelatory.
I was quite amazed to discern the lengths to which such philosophic detachment could bring me. I made a note to resume the experiment again. It might bear fruit.
VOLUME FOUR
12
I had just left Clancy’s office. Clancy was the general manager of the Cosmodemonic Cocksucking Corporation. He was the Cocksucker in Chief, so to speak. He said «Sir» to his inferiors as well as his superiors.
My respect for Clancy had touched zero. For over six months I had avoided calling on him, though it had been understood between us that I was to drop in once a month or so—to have a little chat. To-day he had summoned me to his office. He had expressed disappointment in me. He had virtually intimated that I had failed him.
The poor cluck! If I hadn’t been so disgusted I might have felt sorry for him. He was in a spot, I could see that. But he had angled to put himself in that spot for twenty years or more.
Clancy’s model of behavior was the soldier, the man who can take orders and give them, if necessary. Blind obedience was his motto. Clearly I was a poor soldier. I had been an excellent tool so long as I had been given a free hand, but now that the reins were being tightened he was chagrined to learn that I was not responsive to the behests of those to whom he himself, Clancy, the General Manager, had to bow deferentially. He was pained to hear that I had been insulting to one of Mr. Twilliger’s henchmen. Twilliger was the vice-president, a man with a heart of cement who had risen from the ranks, just as Clancy himself had.
I had swallowed such a lot of shit in that brief interview with my superior that I was regurgitating. The conversation had terminated on a most unpleasant note, to wit, that I was to learn to cooperate with Mr. Spivak who had now definitely become Mr. Twilliger’s go-between.
How can you cooperate with a rat? Especially with a rat whose sole function is to spy on you?
Spivak’s entrance upon the scene, I reflected, as I stepped into a bar to have a drink, had only preceded by a few months my resolution to walk out on the old life. His coming had precipitated that event, or conspired to bring it about, I now felt. The turning point in my cosmococcic life had come at the moment of plenitude. Just when I had put everything in order, when the machine was working like a clock, Twilliger had summoned Spivak from another city and installed him as an efficiency expert. And Spivak had taken the pulse of the cosmococcic machine and found that it was beating too slowly.
Since that fatal day they had moved me around like a chess piece. As if to threaten me, they had first changed my quarters to the main office. Twilliger had his sanctum in the same building, about fifteen floors above me. No shenanigans now, as in the old messenger bureau with the dressing booths in the rear and the zinc-covered table, where now and then I had knocked off a fugitive piece of tail. I was in an airless cage now, surrounded by infernal contraptions that buzzed and rang and gleamed every time a client put in a call for a messenger. In a space just big enough for a double desk and a chair on either side (for the applicants), I had to sweat and shout at the top of my lungs to make myself heard. Three times, in the course of a few months, I had lost my voice. Each time I reported to the company doctor upstairs. Each time he shook his head in perplexity.
«Say Ah!»
«Ah!»
«Say E-e-e-e!»
«E-e-e-e e!»
He’d shove a smooth stick, like a suds duster, down my throat.
«Open your mouth wide.»
I’d open it wide as I could. He’d swab it out, spray it if he felt like it.
«Feel better now?»
I’d to say yes but the best I could do was to give him a vocable piece of phlegm. Ooogh!
«There’s nothing wrong with your throat that I can see,» he would say. «Come back in a few days and I’ll have another look. It may be the weather.»
It never occurred to him to ask what I did with my throat all day long. And of course, once I realized that to lose my voice was to enjoy a few day’s vacation, I felt that it was just as well to leave him in ignorance of the cause of my affliction.
Spivak however suspected that I was malingering. I enjoyed talking to him in an almost inaudible whisper long after I had recovered my voice.
«What did you say?» he would rasp.
Choosing the moment when the din was at its height I would repeat some highly unimportant piece of information in the same inaudible whisper.
«Oh that!—» he would say, highly irritated, exasperated that I made not the slightest effort to strain my voice.
«When do you think you’ll get your voice back?»
«I don’t know,» I would say, looking him straight in the eye and letting my voice die out.
Then he would talk to the call clerk, pump him behind my back to find out if I were putting it on. As soon as he had gone I would resume my natural tone of voice. If the telephone rang, however, I would have my assistant answer it. «Mr. Miller can’t use the phone—his voice is gone.» I kept that up in order to foil Spivak. It was just like him to leave my office, go out the front door, step into a booth and ring me up. He would have been jubilant to catch me off guard.
It was all such a lot of shit, though. Child’s play. In every big corporation these games go on. It’s the only outlet for one’s human side. It’s like civilization. Everything geared up to function smoothly in order to destroy it with a little bon-fire. Just when your impulses have been given a shine, a manicure and a tailor-made suit, a rifle is stuck in your hand and in six lessons you’re expected to learn the art of sticking a bayonet through a sack of wheat. It’s bewildering, to say the least. And if there’s no panic, no war, no revolution, you go on rising from one cock-sucking vantage point to another until you become the Big Prick himself and blow your brains out.
I swallowed another drink and took a glance at the big clock on the Metropolitan Tower. Funny that that clock had inspired the one and only poem I had ever written. That was shortly after they had moved me uptown from the main office. The tower framed itself in the window from which I looked out on to the street. In front of me sat Valeska. It was because of Valeska that I had written the poem. I recalled the excitement that had come over me the Sunday morning I began the poem. It was unbelievable—a poem. I had to call Valeska on the telephone and tell her the good news. A couple of months later she was dead.
That was one time, however, that Curley had managed to get his end in. I had learned that only recently. Seems he used to take her to the beach. He did it, by God, in the water, standing up. The first time, that is. Afterwards it was just fuck, fuck, fuck—in the car, in the bath room, along the waterfront, on the excursion boat.
In the midst of these pleasant reminiscences I saw a tall figure dressed in uniform passing the window. I ran out and hailed him.
«I don’t know whether I ought to come in, Mr. Miller. I’m on duty, you know.»
«That doesn’t matter. Come in a minute and have one drink with me. I’m glad to see you.»
It was Colonel Sheridan, the head of the messenger brigade which Spivak had organized. Sheridan was from Arizona. He had come to me in search of work and I had put him on the night force. I liked Sheridan. He was one of the few dozen clean souls I had raked in among all the thousands I had put to work on the messenger force. Everybody liked him, even that piece of animated cement, Twilliger.
Sheridan
