CHAPTER III


ALIENATION THEORY: As he has done before but never so desperately he placed himself between the woman’s thighs, balanced, inserted, then began in an absent but energetic manner to mime the strokes of generation. He has never been able to comport himself successfully under pressure but this does not excuse him from the obligation to try. He closes his eyes, manufactures images, thinks bitterly that it is not fair that over and again he must go through this without climax before he can proceed but then again he is merely situated within the framework: he has not created it. None of it is his responsibility. After a time when he judges that he has moved sufficiently and that his sincerity cannot be questioned and that it could not be said that he has not tried to do his part he rolls off her, draws up his knees in the darkness and looks at the ceiling waiting for her to speak. She must speak first; there is no way around this. The rules for this part are even more explicit than for the rest: written out. He has checked the list before entering the bleak little simulation of an apartment which she has taken. Finally she says, “What are you trying to do?”

“Save the universe of course,” Scop says.

“But why must you save the universe? Would it not be enough to save yourself?”

“We are intertwined!” Scop says. He rolls to his stomach, poises on palms, slowly lifts himself until he thinks he can see knowing that he does not the eyes of the Masters watching him coolly through the prism. “I am the universe and the universe is myself; when I cease to be the universe will wink out of exis­tence.” His detumescent little organ, puppy like, flaps agreement underneath him. “Everybody understands that,” Scop says.

“But I do not. You must explain it to me.”

Yes. He must explain it to her. There is no way around this Scop knows; he must make sense of this to her. This much, at least, is owed for past favors and if he cannot make her understand how can he possibly approach the more diffuse and less sophisticated Masters, many of whom have no conception of the seriousness of the issues involved? “Be reasonable,” he says, “remember that you are the framing consciousness and that the uni­verse may exist only as refined through your perceptions. But then consider,” he adds, “consider how those perceptions are granted by history, the vast and creaking engines of history at all times lending to these little flickers and glimmers of light the only frame they will ever know . . . and then ask yourself—”

“I am getting very bored,” she says. He feels her fingers mov­ing absently on his organ: the woman will not give up. Either she is insatiable (which he doubts) or she will not accept the humble realities of his condition. “Why don’t you try to fuck me again?”

“Because I can’t fuck you,” Scop says bitterly, “I can’t fuck, all that I can do is devolve—”

“Then why do you try so hard?” she says pinching him, “if you do so poorly? Isn’t it painful for you?”

“Of course it’s painful. Everything is painful. Life is painful, death is painful, likewise the darkness and all motions of passage. Still, I participate.”

Her fingernails dig in deeply. “I don’t know,” she says, “I don’t think you so much participate as complain. Why must you com­plain all the time? Don’t you know how tiresome it is,” she says, “don’t you know how tiresome you are?” and her pressure sends little cylinders of anguish through Scop, “thisis pain,” she says to him knowledgeably, “the other part is merely inconvenience,” and he sees what she is saying, he sees her point, Scop is not (despite his monomania) at all a stupid man and he is willing to accept the doubtful realities of his condition to say nothing of the temporal nature of all that he does. He knows that he will not live for a long time and that when he dies his death is permanent; he does not need explication on the permanent of death. “Please stop that,” he says mildly enough, “you’re hurting me,” and then yanks himself from her quickly, she tries to hang on, he feels her little nails digging into his sex and it is all that Scop can do not to scream but he does not scream of course having long been sealed off from even physical sensation: he will not react, he is a machine, he will not show feeling, he is a mechanism and so he merely lies on the bed extended thinking of all the forces of the universe impinging upon him as unnecessarily she tweaks him again and again, a circumstance which he knows will be repeated.