Philip Dick - We Can Build You

"Yes."

Later, when she drew up before my motel, she said, "Do you think that's the only way to make a lot of money? To be like him?" Sam K. Barrows had changed her; no doubt of that. She was a sobered young woman.

I said, "Don't ask me. I draw seven-fifty a month, at best."

"But one has to admire him."

"I knew you'd say that, sooner or later. As soon as you said but I knew what was going to follow."

Pris sighed, "So I'm an open book to you."

"No, you're the greatest enigma I've ever run up against. It's just in this one case I said to myself, 'Pris is going to say but one has to admire him' and you did say it."

"And I'll bet you also believe I'll gradually go back to the way I used to feel until I leave off the 'but' and just admire him, period."

I said nothing. But it was so.

"Did you notice," Pris said, "that I was able to endure the shutting down of the Lincoln? If I can stand that I can stand anything. I even enjoyed it although I didn't let it show, of course."

"You're lying to beat hell."

"I got a very enjoyable sense of power, an ultimate power. We gave it life and then we took the life right back--snap! As easy as that. But the moral burden doesn't rest on us anyhow; it rests on Sam Barrows, and he wouldn't have had a twinge, he would have gotten a big kick out of it. Look at the strength there, Louis. We really wish we were the same way. I don't regret turning it off. I regret being emotionally upset. I disgust myself for being what I am. No wonder I'm down here with the rest of you and Sam Barrows is up at the top. You can see the difference between him and us; it's so clear."

She was quiet for a time, lighting a cigarette and sitting with it.

"What about sex?" she said presently.

"Sex is worse yet, even than turning off nice simulacra."

"I mean sex changes you. The experience of intercourse."

It froze my blood, to hear her talk like that.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"You scare me."

"Why?"

"You talk as if--"

Pris finished for me, "As if I was up there looking down even on my own body. I am. It's not me. I'm a soul."

"Like Blunk said, 'Show me.'

"I can't, Louis, but it's still true, I'm not a physical body in time and space. Plato was right."

"What about the rest of us?"

"Well, that's your business. I perceive you as bodies, so maybe you are; maybe that's all you are. Don't you know? If you don't know I can't tell you." She put out her cigarette. "I better go home, Louis."

"Okay," I said, opening the car door. The motel, with all its rooms, was dark; even the big neon sign had been shut off for the night. The middle-aged couple who ran the place were no doubt tucked safely in their beds.

Pris said, "Louis, I carry a diaphragm around in my purse."

"The kind you put inside you? Or the kind that's in the chest and you breathe in and out by."

"Don't kid. This is very serious for me, Louis. Sex, I mean."

I said, "Well, then give me funny sex."

"Meaning what?"

"Nothing. Just nothing." I started to shut the car door after me.

"I'm going to say something corny," Pris said, rolling down the window on my side.

"No you're not, because I'm not going to listen. I hate corny statements by deadly serious people. Better you should stay a remote soul that sneers at suffering animals; at least--" I hesitated. But what the hell. "At least I can honestly soberly hate you and fear you."

"How will you feel after you hear the corny statement?" I said, "I'll make an appointment with the hospital tomorrow and have myself castrated or whatever they call it."

"You mean," she said slowly, "that I'm sexually desirable when I'm cruel and schizoid, but if I become MAUDLIN, THEN I'm not even that."

"Don't say 'even.' That's a hell of a lot."

"Take me into your motel room," Pris said, "and screw me."

"There is, somehow, in your language, something, which I can't put my finger on, that somehow leaves something to be desired."

"You're just chicken."

"No," I said.

"Yes."

"No, and I'm not going to prove it by doing so. I really am not chicken; I've slept with all sorts of women in my time. Honest. There isn't a thing about sex that could scare me; I'm too old. You're talking about college-boy stuff, first box of contraceptives stuff."

"But you still won't screw me."

"No," I agreed, "because you're not only detached, you're brutal. And not with just me but with yourself, with the physical body you despise and claim isn't you. Don't you remember that discussion between Lincoln--the Lincoln simulacrum, I mean--and Barrows and Blunk? An animal is close to being man and both are made out of flesh and blood. That's what you're trying not to be."

"Not _trying_--am not."

"What does that make you? A machine."

"But a machine has wires. I have no wires."

"Then what?" I said. "What do you think you are?"

Pris said, "I know what I am. The schizoid is very common in this century, like hysteria was in the nineteenth. It's a form of deep, pervasive, subtle psychic alienation. I wish I wasn't, but I am... you're lucky, Louis Rosen; you're oldfashioned. I'd trade with you. I'm worried that my language regarding sex is crude. I scared you off with it. I'm very sorry about that."

"Not crude. Worse. Inhuman. You'd--I know what you'd do. If you had intercourse with someone--if you've had." I felt confused and tired. "You'd observe, the whole goddam time; mentally, spiritually, in every way. Always be conscious."

"Is that wrong? I thought everyone did."

"Goodnight." I started away from the car.

"Goodnight, coward."

"Up yours," I said.

"Oh, Louis," she said, with a shiver of anguish.

"Forgive me," Isaid.

Sniffling, she said, "What an awful thing to say."

"For christ's sake, forgive me," I said, "you have to forgive me. I'm the sick one, for saying that to you; it's like something took hold of my tongue."

Still sniffling, she nodded mutely. She started up the motor of the car and turned its lights on.

"Don't go," I said. "Listen, you can chalk it up to a demented subrational attempt on my part to reach you, don't you see? All your talk, your making yourself admire Sam Barrows even more than ever, that drove me out of my mind. I'm very fond of you, I really am; seeing you open up for a minute to a warm, human view, and then going back--"

"Thanks," she said in a near whisper, "for trying to make me feel better." She shot me a tiny smile.

"Don't let this make you worse," I said, holding onto the door of the car, afraid she would leave.

"It won't. In fact it barely touched me."

"Come on inside," I said. "Sit for a moment, okay?"

"No. Don't worry--it's just the strain on us all. I know it upset you. The reason I use such crude words is that I don't know any better, nobody taught me how to talk about the unspeakable things."

"It just takes experience. But listen, Pris, promise me something, promise me you won't deny to yourself that I hurt you. It's good to be able to feel what you felt just now, good to--"

"Good to be hurt."

"No, I don't mean that; I mean it's encouraging. I'm not trying merely to make up for what I did. Look, Pris, the fact that you suffered so acutely just now because of what I--"

"The hell I did."

"You did," I said. "Don't lie."

"All right, Louis, I did; I won't lie." She hung her head.

Opening the car door I said, "Come with me, Pris."

She shut off the motor and car lights and slid out; I took hold of her by the arm.

"Is this the first step in delicious intimacy?" she asked.

"I'm acquainting you with the unspeakable."

"I just want to be able to talk about it, I don't want to have to do it. Of course you're joking; we're going to sit side by side and then I'll go home. That's best for both of us, in fact it's the only course open."