John MacDonald - Trojan Horse Laugh

“Please don’t use that expression, Pard. And who helped ole Doc by compiling all those pretty figures? Who hut our girl, Alice? Wanna stand trial, kitten?”

She looked at him for long seconds. “Joe Morgan, you better buy me another drink.”

He said: “I mailed out releases to a batch of syndicates. Maybe somebody’ll print the stuff I dug up.”

FROM DELANCEY BOOKER’S COLUMN IN THE WASHINGTON MORNING SENTINEL: Happiness, Incorporated, is expanding their operations at an amazing speed. It is only a week since their Washington Agency was established and already it is reported that over seven thousand of our fellow citizens have reported to have profiles made of their emotional cycles. As usual with every move intended to approve the lot of the common mail, several Congressmen who represent the worst elements of isolationism and conservatism are attempting to jam through a bill designed to ham-string Happiness, Incorporated. These gentlemen who look at life through a perpetual peashooter are trying to stir up public alarm on the basis that the procedures used by Happiness, incorporated, have not been properly tested. They will find the going difficult, however, because, though they do not know it, some of their enemies in Congress have already received the initial inoculation. Your columnist saw them there while having his own cycle plotted.

EXCERPT FROM THE INFORMAL TALK GIVEN TO ALL EXECUTIVES OF THE HEATON STEEL COMPANY BY THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD: “Using our Daylon Plant as a test, it has been conclusively proven that Happiness, Incorporated, is the answer to industrial unrest, high taxes and dwindling profit Consequently you will be glad to know that, starting tomorrow morning, we have made special arrangements with Happiness, Incorporated, to set up an inoculation center in every one of our fourteen plants. Within forty days the entire hundred and sixteen thousand employees of Heaton Steel will be happy and adjusted. This procedure will be optional for executives. Any man who refuses to be so treated will please rise.”

NOTE ON BULLETIN BOARD AT PAKINSON FIELD, HEADQUARTERS OF THE 28th BOMBARDMENT GROUP: “All personnel is advised that, beginning tomorrow, 18 Sept., Bldg. 83 will be set aside for civilian employees of Happiness Incorporated. Any military personnel desirous of undergoing adjustment can obtain, for a special price of five dollars, a card entitling him or her to receive a complete emotional adjustment Styled to fit the Optimum curve. In. this matter you will notice that the Air Corps has once again moved with greater rapidity than either the Army or the Navy — 2nd Lt. Albert Anderson Daley, Post Exchange Officer.”

MEMO TO ALL MEMBER STATIONS, INTERCOAST BROADCASTING COMPANY: In the spot commercials previously contracted for, kindly revise lyric to read as follows, utilizing local talent until new disks can be cut:

Remainder to be, “Go to your nearest adjustment station set up in your community by Happiness, Incorporated. See those happy smiles? Do not wait... et cetera... et cetera... et cetera.

FROM THE SCRIPT OF THE CAROLAX PROGRAM, FEATURING BUNNY JUKES AND HIS GANG:

Bunny:...yeah, and fellas, I went in and they fastened those gimmicks on my head and they started plotting my cycle.

Others: And what happened, Bunny?

Bunny: While they were working this dolly walked through the office and boy, do I mean dolly! My tired old eyes glazed when she gave me that Carolax smile, what I mean.

Stooge: And what then? (eagerly)

Bunny: The doc looks down at the drum where the pen is drawing my cycle and he says, ‘Mr. Jukes, you are the first patient in the history of Happiness, Incorporated, whose cycle forms the word — WOW!

Audience: Laughter.

Daylon in transition. For twenty days the spiral has been upward. Tomorrow it will reach a peak. There is laughter in the streets and people sing.

The city has a new motto. The Original Home of Happiness. The city is proud of being the first one selected.

Everyone walks about with a look of secret glee, as though barely able to contain themselves with the thought of the epic joy that the morrow will bring.

And those that have not been adjusted find that they, too, are caught up in the holiday spirit, in the air of impending revel. Strangers grin at each other and whole buses, homeward bound from work, ring with song as everyone joins in. Old songs. “Let a Smile be Your Umbrella”, “Singing in the Rain”, “Smiles”, “Smile the While”.

Joe Morgan and Alice Pardette have grown very close in the past twenty days. To him it is a new relationship — a woman who can think as frankly and honestly as any man, who has about her none of the usual feminine deviousness, though physically she is so completely feminine as to make his pulse pound.

And Alice, too, finds something in Joe she has never before experienced. A man willing to take her at face value, a man who does not try to force their relationship into channels of undesired intimacies, a man who listens to what she says and who will argue, person to person, rather than man to woman.

Dusk is over the city and the buzzing neon lights up the overcast in hue of pink-orange. The old car is parked where often he parked with Sadie Barnum. H wonders what Sadie is doing. They look out over the city and they are not at case.

“Joe,” she said suddenly, “don’t you feel it when you’re down there with them?”

“You mean feel as though I want to go around grinning like an idiot, too? Yes, and it scares me, somehow. I knew a few other guys who didn’t want to have anything to do with being adjusted. Now they’re as bad as the ones who had the shots. That good cheer is like a big fuzzy cloud hanging over the city.”

“And it’s worse than last time, isn’t it, Joe?” she asked softly.

He nodded. “Worse in a funny way. It’s sort of like the city was a big machine and now the governor is broken and it’s moving too fast. It’s creaking its way up and up and up to where maybe it’ll spin apart.”

She said: “Or like a boat that was going over gentle regular waves and now the waves are getting bigger and bigger.”

He turned and grinned at her. “You know, we can scare each other into a tizzy.”

Alice didn’t respond to his grin. She said in a remote voice: “Tomorrow is going to be... odd. I feel it. Joe, let’s stay together tomorrow. Please.”

She rested her hand on his wrist.

Suddenly she was in his arms. For the first time.

Thirty seconds later Joe said unsteadily, “For a statistician you—”

“I guess you’d better make a joke of it, Joe. I guess maybe it’s the only thing you can do, Joe. I guess... it wasn’t ever this way before.”

Like a slow rocket rising for twenty days, bursting into a bright banner of flame on the twenty-first day.

Joe walked out of his apartment into the street, turned and stared incredulously at an elderly man who, laughing so hard that he wept, held himself up by clinging to a lamp-post. The impossible laughter was contagious, even as it frightened. Joe felt laughter stretching his lips, painting itself across his mouth.

At that moment he dodged aside, barely in time. A heavy convertible, a woman with tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks behind the wheel, bounced up over the curb. The old gentleman, still laughing, was cradled neatly on the bumper, was carried over and crushed against the gray stone front of the apartment building.

Blood ran in a heavy slow current down the slope of the sidewalk toward the gutter. The crowd gathered quickly. For just a fleeting second they wore solemn and then someone giggled and they were off. They howled with laughter and pounded each other’s shoulders and staggered in their laughter so that the blood was tracked in wavered lines back and forth.