Ira Levin - This Perfect Day

Karl asked him too, in the morning while they were folding their blankets. “What’s the matter, Li?”

“Nothing.”

“Sorry to be leaving?”

“A little.”

“Me too. Here, give me your sheets and I’ll chute them.”

“What’s his nameber?” Li YB asked.

“Karl WL35S7497,” Chip said.

Li YB jotted it down. “And what specifically seems to be the trouble?” he asked.

Chip wiped his palms on his thighs. “He’s drawn some pictures of members,” he said.

“Acting aggressively?”

“No, no,” Chip said. “Just standing and sitting, fucking, playing with children.”

“Well?”

Chip looked at the desktop. “They don’t have bracelets,” he said.

Li YB didn’t speak. Chip looked at him; he was looking at Chip. After a moment Li YB said, “Several pictures?”

“A whole padful.”

“And no bracelets at all.”

“None.”

Li YB breathed in, and then pushed out the breath between his teeth in a series of rapid hisses. He looked at his note pad. “KWL35S7497,” he said.

Chip nodded.

He tore up the picture of the man with the crossbow, which was aggressive, and tore up the one of the ape too. He took the pieces to the chute and dropped them down.

He put the last few things into his take-along kit—his clippers and mouthpiece and a framed snapshot of his parents and Papa Jan—and pressed it closed.

Karl’s girlfriend came by with her kit slung on her shoulder. “Where’s Karl?” she asked.

“At the medicenter.”

“Oh,” she said. “Tell him I said good-by, will you?”

“Sure.”

They kissed cheeks. “Good-by,” she said.

“Good-by.”

She went away down the aisle. Some other students, no longer students, went past. They smiled at Chip and said good-by to him.

He looked around the barren cubicle. The picture of the horse was still on the bulletin board. He went to it and looked at it; saw again the rearing stallion, so alive and wild. Why hadn’t Karl stayed with the animals in the zoo? Why had he begun to draw living humans?

A feeling formed in Chip, formed and grew; a feeling that he had been wrong to tell Li YB about Karl’s drawings, although he knew of course that he had been right. How could it be wrong to help a sick brother? Not to tell would have been wrong, to keep quiet as he had done before, letting Karl go on drawing members without bracelets and getting sicker and sicker. Eventually he might even have been drawing members acting aggressively. Fighting.

Of course he had been right.

Yet the feeling that he had been wrong stayed and kept growing, grew into guilt, irrationally.

Someone came near, and he whirled, thinking it was Karl coming to thank him. It wasn’t; it was someone passing the cubicle, leaving.

But that was what was going to happen: Karl was going to come back from the medicenter and say, “Thanks for helping me, Li. I was really sick but I’m a whole lot better now,” and he was going to say, “Don’t thank me, brother; thank Uni,” and Karl was going to say, “No, no,” and insist and shake his hand.

Suddenly he wanted not to be there, not to get Karl’s thanks for having helped him; he grabbed his kit and hurried to the aisle—stopped short, uncertainly, and hurried back. He took the picture of the horse from the board, opened his kit on the desk, pushed the drawing in among the pages of a notebook, closed the kit, and went.

He jogged down the downgoing escalators, excusing himself past other members, afraid that Karl might come after him; jogged all the way down to the lowest level, where the rail station was, and got on the long airport line. He stood with his head held still, not looking back.

Finally he came to the scanner. He faced it for a moment, and touched it with his bracelet. Yes, it green-winked.

He hurried through the gate.

BETWEEN JULY OF 153 and Marx of 162, Chip had four assignments: two at research laboratories in Usa; a brief one at the Institute of Genetic Engineering in Ind, where he attended a series of lectures on recent advances in mutation induction; and a five-year assignment at a chemo-synthetics plant in Chi. He was upgraded twice in his classification and by 162 was a genetic taxonomist, second class.

During those years he was outwardly a normal and contented member of the Family. He did his work well, took part in house athletic and recreational programs, had weekly sexual activity, made monthly phone calls and bi-yearly visits to his parents, was in place and on time for TV and treatments and adviser meetings. He had no discomfort to report, either physical or mental.

Inwardly, however, he was far from normal. The feeling of guilt with which he had left the Academy had led him to withhold himself from his next adviser, for he wanted to retain that feeling, which, though unpleasant, was the strongest feeling he had ever had and an enlargement, strangely, of his sense of being; and withholding himself from his adviser—reporting no discomfort, playing the part of a relaxed, contented member—had led over the years to a withholding of himself from everyone around him, a general attitude of guarded watchfulness. Everything came to seem questionable to him: totalcakes, coveralls, the sameness of members’ rooms and thoughts, and especially the work he was doing, whose end, he saw, would only be to solidify the universal sameness. There were no alternatives, of course, no imaginable alternatives to anything, but still he withheld himself, and questioned. Only in the first few days after treatments was he really the member he pretended to be.

One thing alone in the world was indisputably right: Karl’s drawing of the horse. He framed it—not in a supply-center frame but in one he made himself, out of wood strips ripped from the back of a drawer and scraped smooth—and hung it in his rooms in Usa, his room in Ind, his room in Chi. It was a lot better to look at than Wei Addressing the Chemotherapists or Marx Writing or Christ Expelling the Money Changers.

In Chi he thought of getting married, but he was told that he wasn’t to reproduce and so there didn’t seem much point in it.

In mid-Marx of 162, shortly before his twenty-seventh birthday, he was transferred back to the Institute of Genetic Engineering in IND26110 and assigned to a newly established Genie Subclassification Center. New microscopes had found distinctions between genes that until then had appeared identical, and he was one of forty 663B’s and C’s put to defining subclassifications. His room was four buildings away from the Center, giving him a short walk twice a day, and he soon found a girlfriend whose room was on the floor below his. His adviser was a year younger than he, Bob RO. Life apparently was going to continue as before.

One night in April, though, as he made ready to clean his teeth before going to bed, he found a small white something lodged in his mouthpiece. Perplexed, he picked it out. It was a triple bend of tightly rolled paper. He put down the mouthpiece and unrolled a thin rectangle filled with typing. You seem to be a fairly unusual member, it said. Wondering about which classification you would choose, for instance. Would you like to meet some other unusual members? Think about it. You are only partly alive. We can help you more than you can imagine.

The note surprised him with its knowledge of his past and disturbed him with its secrecy and its “You are only partly alive.” What did it mean—that strange statement and the whole strange message? And who had put it in his mouthpiece, of all places? But there was no better place, it struck him, for making certain that he and he alone should find it. Who then, not so foolishly, had put it there? Anyone at all could have come into the room earlier in the evening or during the day. At least two other members had done so; there had been notes on his desk from Peace SK, his girlfriend, and from the secretary of the house photography club.