Thomas M Disch - Understanding Human Behavior.pdf - po ang - Januszek66

Understanding Human Behavior

By Thomas M. Disch

H e would wake up each morning with a consciousness clear as the Boulder sky, a sense of

being on the same wave length exactly as the sunlight. Innocence, bland dreams, a healthy

appetite -- these were glories that issued directly from his having been erased. Of course,

there were some corresponding disadvantages. His job, monitoring the terminals of a drive-in

convenience center, could get pretty dull, especially on days when no one drove in for an

hour or so at a stretch, and even at the busiest times it didn't provide much opportunity for

human contact. He envied the waitresses in restaurants and the drivers of buses their chance

to say hello to real live customers.

Away from work it was different; he didn't feel the same hunger for socializing. That, in fact,

was the major disadvantage of having no past life, no established preferences, no identity in

the usual sense of a history to attach his name to -- he just didn't want anything very much.

Not that he was bored or depressed or anything like that. The world was all new to him, and

full of surprises: the strangeness of anchovies; the beauty of old songs in their blurry Muzak

versions at the Stop-and-Shop; the feel of a new shirt or a March day. These sensations

were not wholly unfamiliar, nor was his mind a tabula rasa. His use of the language and his

motor skills were all intact; also what the psychologists at Delphi Institute called generic

recognition. But none of the occasions of newness reminded him of any earlier experience,

some first time or best time or worst time that he'd survived. His only set of memories of a

personal and non-generic character were those he'd brought from the halfway house in Delphi,

Indiana. But such fine memories they were -- so fragile, so distinct, so privileged. If only (he

often wished) he could have lived out his life in the sanctuary of Delphi, among men and

women like himself, all newly summoned to another life and responsive to the wonders and

beauties around them. But no, for reasons he could not understand, the world insisted on

being organized otherwise. An erasee was allowed six months at the Institute, and then he

was dispatched to wherever he or the computer decided, where he would have to live like

everyone else, either alone or in a family (though the Institute advised everyone to be wary

at first of establishing primary ties), in a small room or a cramped house or a dormitory ship in

some tropical lagoon. Unless you were fairly rich or very lucky, your clothes, furniture, and

suchlike appurtenances were liable to be rough, shabby, makeshift. The food most people ate

was an incitement to infantile gluttony, a slop of sugars, starches, and chemically enhanced

flavors. It would have been difficult to live among such people and to seem to share their

values, except so few of them ever questioned the reasonableness of their arrangements.

Those who did, if they had the money, would probably opt, eventually, to have their identities

erased, since it was clear, just looking around, that erasees seemed to strike the right

intuitive balance between being aware and keeping calm.

He lived now in a condo on the northwest edge of the city, a room and a half with unlimited

off-peak power access. The rent was modest (so was his salary), but his equity in the condo

was large enough to suggest that his pre-erasure income had been up there in the top

percentiles.

He wondered, as all erasees do, why he'd decided to wipe out his past. His life had gone sour,

that much was sure, but how and why were questions that could never be answered. The

Institute saw to that. A shipwrecked marriage was the commonest reason statistically, closely

followed by business reverses. At least that was what people put down on their

questionnaires when they applied to the Institute. Somehow he doubted those reasons were

the real ones. People who'd never been erased seemed oddly unable to account for their

behavior. Even to themselves they would tell the unlikeliest tales about what they were doing

and why. Then they'd spend a large part of their social life exposing each others' impostures

and laughing at them. A sense of humor they called it. He was glad he didn't have one, yet.

Most of his free time he spent making friends with his body. In his first weeks at the halfway

house he'd lazed about, eaten too much junk food, and started going rapidly to seed. Erasees

are not allowed to leave their new selves an inheritance of obesity or addiction, but often the

body one wakes up in is the hasty contrivance of a crash diet. The mouth does not lose its

appetites, nor the metabolism its rate, just because the mind has had memories whited out.

Fortunately he'd dug in his heels, and by the time he had to bid farewell to Delphi's communal

dining room he'd lost the pounds he'd put on, and eight more besides.

Since then fitness had been his religion. He bicycled to work, to Stop-and-Shop, and all about

Denver, exploring its uniformities. He hiked and climbed on weekends. He jogged. Once a

week, at a Y, he played volleyball for two hours, just as though he'd never left the Institute.

He also kept up the other sport he'd had to learn at Delphi, which was karate. Except for the

volleyball, he stuck to the more solitary forms of exercise, because on the whole he wasn't

interested in forming relationships. The lecturers at the halfway house had said this was

perfectly natural, and nothing to worry about. He shouldn't socialize until he felt hungry for

more society than his job and his living arrangements naturally provided. So far that hunger

had not produced a single pang. Maybe he was what the Institute called a natural integer. If

so, that seemed an all-right fate.

What he did miss, consciously and sometimes achingly, was a purpose. In common with most

fledgling erasees, there was nothing he believed in -- no religion, no political idea, no ambition

to become famous for doing something better than somebody else. Money was about the only

purpose he could think of, and even that was not a compelling purpose. He didn't lust after

more and more and more of it in the classical Faustian go-getter way.

His room and a half looked out across the tops of a small plantation of spruces to the highway

that climbed the long southwestward incline into the Rockies. Each car that hummed along the

road was like a vector-quantity of human desire, a quantum of teleological purpose. He might

have been mistaken. The people driving those cars might be just as uncertain of their ultimate

destinations as he was, but, seeing them whiz by in their primary colors, he found that hard to

believe. Anyone who was prepared to bear the expense of a car surely had somewhere he

wanted to get to or something he wanted to do more intensely than he could imagine, up here

on his three-foot slab of balcony.

He didn't have a telephone or a TV. He didn't read newspapers or magazines, and the only

books he ever looked at were some old textbooks on geology he'd bought at a garage sale in

Denver. He didn't go to movies. The ability to suspend disbelief in something that had never

happened was one he'd lost when he was erased, assuming he'd ever had it. A lot of the time

he couldn't suspend his disbelief in the real people around him, all their pushing and pulling,

their weird fears and whopping lies, their endless urges to control other people's behavior, like

the vegetarian cashier at the Stop-and-Shop or the manager at the convenience center. The

lectures and demonstrations at the halfway house had laid out the basics, but without

explaining any of it. Like harried parents, the Institute's staff had said, "Do this," and "Don't do

that," and he'd not been in a position to argue. He did as he was bid, and his behavior fit as

naturally as an old suit.

His name -- the name by which he'd christened his new self before erasure -- was Richard

Roe, and that seemed to fit too.

At the end of September, three months after coming to Boulder, Richard signed up for a

course in Consumership: Theory and Practice at the Naropa Adult Education Center. There

were twelve other students in the class, all with the dewy, slightly vulnerable look of recent

erasure. They sat in their folding chairs, reading or just blank, waiting for the teacher, who

arrived ten minutes late, out of breath and gasping apologies. Professor Astor. While she was

still collecting punchcards and handing out flimsy Xeroxes of their reading list, she started

lecturing to them. Before she could get his card (he'd chosen a seat in the farthest row back)

she was distracted by the need to list on the blackboard the three reasons that people wear

clothing, which are:

Utility,

Communication, and

Self-Concept.

Utility was obvious and didn't need going into, while Self-Concept was really a sub-category

of Communication, a kind of closed-circuit transmission between oneself and a mirror.

"Now, to illustrate the three basic aspects of Communication, I have some slides." She sat

down behind the A/V console at the front of the room and fussed with the buttons anxiously,

muttering encouragements to herself. Since the question was there in the air, he wondered

what her black dress was supposed to be communicating. It was a wooly, baggy, practical

dress, sprinkled with dandruff and gathered loosely about the middle by a wide belt of cracked

patent leather. The spirit of garage sales hovered about it. "There!" she said.

But the slide that flashed on the screen was a chart illustrating cuts of beef. "Damn," she

said, "that's next week. Well, it doesn't matter. I'll write it on the board."

When she stood up and turned around, it seemed clear that one of the utilitarian functions of

her dress was to disguise or obfuscate some twenty-plus pounds of excess baggage. A jumble

of thin bracelets jingled as she wrote on the board:

Desire,

Admiration,

Solidarity.

"There," she said, laying down the chalk and swinging round to face them, setting the heavy

waves of black hair to swaying pendulously, "it's as simple as red, white, and blue. These are

the three types of response people try to elicit from others by the clothes they wear. Blue, of

course, would represent solidarity. Policemen wear blue. French workingmen have always worn

a blinding blue. And then there's the universal uniform of blue denim. It's a cool color, and

tends to make those who wear it recede into the background. They vanish into the blue, so to

speak.

"Then white." She took a blank piece of paper from her desk and held it up as a sample of

whiteness. "White is for white-collar workers, the starched white shirt wearable only for a

single day being a timeless symbol of conspicuous consumption. I wish the slide projector

worked for this: I have a portrait by Hals of a man wearing one of those immense Dutch

collars, and you couldn't begin to imagine the work-hours that must have gone into washing

and ironing the damned thing. The money. Basically that's what our second category is about.

There's a book by Thorstein Veblen on the reading list that explains it all. Admittedly there are

qualities other than solvency and success we may be called upon to admire in what people

wear: good taste, a sense of paradox or wit, even courage, as when one walks through a

dangerous neighborhood without the camouflage of denim. But good taste usually boils down

to money: the good taste of petroleum-derived polyesters as against--" She smiled and ran

her hand across the pilled cloth of her dress. "--the bad taste of wool. Wit, likewise, is usually

the wit of combining contradictory class-recognition signals in the same costume -- an

evening gown, say, trimmed with Purina patches. You should all be aware, as consumers, that

the chief purpose of spending a lot of money on what you wear is to proclaim your allegiance

to money per se, and to a career devoted to earning it, or, in the case of diamond rings, the

promise to keep one's husband activated. Though in this case we begin to impinge on the

realm of desire."

To all which he gave about as much credence as he gave to actors in ads. Like most theories,

it made the world seem more, not less, complicated. Ho-hum, thought he, as he doodled a

crisp doodle of a many-faceted diamond. But then as she expounded her ideas about Desire

he grew uneasy, then embarrassed, and finally teed-off.

"Red," she said, reading from her deck of three-by-fives, "is the color of desire. Love is always

like a red, red rose. It lies a-bleeding like a beautiful steak in a supermarket. To wear red is to

declare oneself ready for action, especially if the color is worn below the waist."

There he sat in the back row in his red shorts and red sneakers thinking angry red thoughts.

He refused to believe it was a coincidence. He was wearing red shorts because he'd bicycled

here, a five-mile ride, not because he wanted to semaphore his instant availability to the

world at large. He waited till she'd moved off the subject of Desire, then left the classroom as

inconspicuously as possible. In the Bursar's Office he considered the other Wednesday night

possibilities, mostly workshops in posture or poetry or suchlike. Only one -- A Survey of Crime

in 20th Century America -- offered any promise of explaining people's behavior, so that was

the one he signed up for.

The next day, instead of going to work, he went out to New Focus and watched hang-gliders.

The most amazing of them was a crippled woman who arrived in a canvas sling. Rochelle

Rockefeller's exploits had made her so famous that even Richard knew about her, not only on

account of her flying but because she was one of the founding mothers of New Focus, and

had been involved in sizable altercations with the state police. The two women who carried

her down from New Focus in the sling busied themselves with straps and buckles and then, at

Rochelle's nod, launched her off the side of the cliff. She rose, motor-assisted, on the updraft,

and waved to her daughter, who sat watching on the edge of the cliff. The girl waved back.

Then the girl went off by herself to the picnic table area, where two rag dolls awaited her

atop one of the tables.

He walked over to the table and asked if she minded if he shared the bench with her.

She shook her head, and then in a rather dutiful tone introduced her dolls. The older was Ms.

Chillywiggles, the younger was Ms. Sillygiggles. They were married. "And my name is Rochelle,

the same as my mother. What's yours?"

"Richard Roe."

"Did you bring any food? "

"No. Sorry."

"Oh well, we'll just have to pretend. Here's some tuna fish, and here's some cake." She doled

out the imaginary food with perfunctory mime to her dolls, and then with exaggerated delicacy

she held up -- what was it? -- something for him.

"Open your mouth and close your eyes," she insisted.

He did, and felt her fingers on his tongue.

"What was that?" he asked, afterward.

"Holy Communion. Did you like it?"

"Mm."

"Are you a Catholic?"

"No, unless that just made me one."

" We are. We believe in God the Father Almighty and everything. Ms. Chillywiggles was even in

a convent before she got married. Weren't you?" Ms. Chillywiggles nodded her large, wobbly

head.

Finding the subject uncomfortable, he changed it. "Look at your mother up there now. Wow."

Rochelle sighed and for a moment, to be polite, glanced up to where her mother was soaring,

hundreds of feet above.

"It's incredible, her flying like that."

"That's what everyone says. But you don't need your leg muscles for a hang-glider, just your

arms. And her arms are very strong."

"I'll bet."

" Some day we're going to go to Denver and see the dolls' Pope."

"Really. I didn't know dolls had a Pope."

"They do."

"Will you look at her now!"

"I don't like to, it makes me sick. I didn't want to come today, but no one would look after me.

They were all building. So I had to."

"It doesn't make you want to fly someday, seeing her up there like that?"

"No. Some day she's going to kill herself. She knows it, too. That's how she had her accident,

you know. She wasn't always in a wheelchair."

"Yes, I've heard that."

"What's so awful for me is to think she won't ever be able to receive the Last Sacrament."

The sun glowed through the red nylon wings of the glider, but even Professor Astor would

have had a hard time making that fit her theory. Desire! Why not just Amazement?

"If she does kill herself," Rochelle continued dispassionately, " we'll be sent to an orphanage. In

Denver, I hope. And Ms. Chillywiggles will be able to do missionary work among the dolls there.

Do you have any dolls, Mr. Roe?"

He shook his head.

"I suppose you think dolls are only for girls. That's a very old prejudice, however. Dolls are for

anyone who likes them."

"I may have had dolls when I was younger. I don't know."

"Oh. Were you erased?"

He nodded.

"So was my mother. But I was only a baby then, so I don't remember any more about her than

she does. What I think is she must have committed some really terrible sin, and it tortured her

so much she decided to be erased. Do you ever go in to Denver?"

"Sometimes."

Ms. Sillygiggles whispered something in Ms. Chillywiggles' ear, who evidently did not agree with

the suggestion. Rochelle looked cast down. "Damn," she said.

Thomas M Disch - Understanding Human Behavior.pdf

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