Martin Amis - Einstein's Monsters

I don't know what is wrong. I have just read Dan's notebook, before sending it off to Slizard at the Section, as requested. I feel a fool, and an old one. To a culpable extent I lacked-I lacked insight. And what else? I have just read Dan's notebook and all I have in my head is a thought straight out of left field. Yesterday, at breakfast, Dan was there. As he drank his juice he gazed at the backs of the cereal boxes. What could be more-what could be more natural? I used to do that myself as a kid: toy-aircraft designs, send-in competitions, funnies, waffle and cookie recipes. But now? On the back of the high-fiber bran package there are dietary tips for avoiding cancer. On the back of the half-gallon carton of homogenized, pasteurized, vitamin D-fortified milk there are two mugshots of smiling children, gone, missing. (Have You Seen Them?). Date of birth, 7/ 7/79. Height, 3'6". Hair, brown. Eyes, blue. Missing, and missed, too, I'll bet-oh, most certainly. Done away with, probably, fucked and thrown over a wall somewhere, fucked and murdered, yeah, that's the most likely thing. I don't know what is wrong.

Twenty-twenty, and the time disease is epidemic. In my credit group, anyway. And yours too, friend, unless I miss my guess. Nobody thinks about anything else anymore. Nobody even pretends to think about anything else anymore. Oh yeah, except the sky, of course. The poor sky… It's a thing. It's a situation. We all think about time, catching time, coming down with time. I'm still okay, I think, for the time being.

I took out my hand mirror. Everybody carries at least one hand mirror now. On the zip trains you see whole carloads jackknifed over in taut scrutiny of their hairlines and eye sockets. The anxiety is as electric as the twanging cable above our heads. They say more people are laid low by time-anxiety than by time itself. But only time is fatal. It's a problem, we agree, a definite feature. How can you change the subject when there's only one subject? People don't want to talk about the sky. They don't want to talk about the sky, and I don't blame them.

I took out my hand mirror and gave myself a ten-second scan: lower gumline, left eyelash count. I felt so heartened that I moved carefully into the kitchen and cracked out a beer. I ate a hero, and a ham salad. I lit another cigarette. I activated the TV and keyed myself in to the Therapy Channel. I watched a seventy-year-old documentary about a road-widening scheme in a place called Orpington, over in England there… Boredom is meant to be highly prophylactic when it comes to time. We are all advised to experience as much boredom as we possibly can. To bore somebody is said to be even more sanative than to be bored oneself. That's why we're always raising'our voices in company and going on and on about anything that enters our heads. Me I go on about time the whole time: a reckless habit. Listen to me. I'm at it again.

The outercom sounded. I switched from Therapy to Intake, No visual. "Who is it?" I asked the TV. The TV told me. I sighed and put the call on a half-minute hold. Soothing music. Boring music… Okay-you want to hear my theory? Now, some say that time was caused by congestion, air plague, city life (and city life is the only kind of life there is these days). Others say that time was a result of the first nuclear conflicts (limited theater, Persia v. Pakistan, Zaire v. Nigeria, and so on, no really big deal or anything: they took the heat and the light, and we took the cold and the dark; it helped fuck the sky, that factor) and more particularly of the saturation TV coverage that followed: all day the screen writhed with flesh, flesh dying or living in a queer state of age. Still others say that time was an evolutionary consequence of humankind's ventures into space (they shouldn't have gone out there, what with things so rocky back home). Food, pornography, the cancer cure… Me I think it was the twentieth century that did it. The twentieth century was all it took.

"Hi there, Happy," I said. "What's new?"

"… Lou?" her voice said warily. "Lou, I don't feel so good."

"That's not new. That's old."

"I don't feel so good. I think it's really happening this time."

"Oh, sure."

Now this was Happy Farraday. That's right: the TV star. The Happy Farraday. Oh, we go way back, Happy and me.

"Let's take a look at you," I said. "Come on, Happy, give me a visual on this."

The screen remained blank, its dead cells seeming to squirm or hover. On impulse I switched from Intake to Daydrama. There was Happy, full face to camera, vividly doing her thing. I switched back. Still no visual. I said, "I just checked you out on the other channel. You're in superb shape. What's your factor?"

"It's here," said her voice. "It's time."

TV stars are especially prone to time-anxiety-to time too, it has to be said. Why? Well, I think we're looking at an occupational hazard here. It's a thing. True, the work could hardly be more boring. Not many people know this, but all the characters in the Armchair, Daydrama, and Proscenium channels now write their own lines. It's a new gimmick, intended to promote formlessness, to combat sequentiality, and so on: the target-research gurus have established that this goes down a lot better with the homebound. Besides, all the writing talent is in game-conception or mass-therapy, doing soothe stuff for the nonemployed and other sections of the populace that are winding down from being functional. There are fortunes to be made in the leisure and assuagement industries. The standout writers are like those teenage billionaires in the early days of the chip revolution. On the other hand, making money-like reading and writing, come to that-dangerously increases your time-anxiety levels. Obviously. The more money you have, the more time you have to worry about time. It's a thing. Happy Farraday is top credit, and she also bears the weight of TV fame (where millions know you or think they do), that collective sympathy, identification, and concern that, I suspect, seriously depletes your time-resistance. I've started to keep a kind of file on this. I'm beginning to think of it as reciprocity syndrome, one of the new-

Where was I? Yeah. On the line with Happy here. My mind has a tendency to wander. Indulge me. It helps, time-wise.

"Okay. You want to tell me what symptoms you got?" She told me. "Call a doctor," I joked. "Look, give me a break. This is-what? The second time this year? The third?"

"It's different this time."

"It's the new role, Happy. That's all it is." In her new series on Daydrama, Happy was playing the stock part of a glamorous forty-year-old with a bad case of time-anxiety. And it was getting to her-of course it was. "You know where I place the blame? On your talent! As an actress you're just too damn good. Greg Buzhardt and I were-"

"Save it, Lou," she said. "Don't bore me out. It's real. It's time."

"I know what you're going to do. I know what you're going to do. You're going to ask me to drive over."

"I'll pay."

"It's not the money, Happy, it's the time."

"Take the dollar lane."

"Wow," I said. "You're, you must be kind of serious this time."

So I stood on the shoulder, waiting for Roy to bring up my Horsefly from the stacks. Well, Happy is an old friend and one of my biggest clients, also an ex-wife of mine, and I had to do the right thing. For a while out there I wasn't sure what time it was supposed to be or whether I had a day or night situation on my hands-but then I saw the faint tremors and pulsings of the sun, up in the east. The heavy green light sieved down through the ripped and tattered troposphere, its fissures as many-eyed as silk or pantyhose, with a liquid quality too, churning, changing. Green light: let's go… I had a bad scare myself the other week, a very bad scare. I was in bed with Danuta and we were going to have a crack at making love. Okay, a dumb move-but it was her birthday, and we'd been doing a lot of tranquilizers that night. I don't happen to believe that lovemaking is quite as risky as some people say. To hear some people talk, you'd think that sex was a suicide pact. To hold hands is to put your life on the line. "Look at the time-fatality figures among the under classes," I tell them. They screw like there's no tomorrow, and do they come down with time? No, it's us high-credit characters who are really at risk. Like me and Danuta. Like Happy. Like you… Anyway, we were lying on the bed together, as I say, seminude, and talking about the possibility of maybe getting into the right frame of mind for a little of the old pre-foreplay-when all of a sudden I felt a rosy glow break out on me like sweat. There was this clogged inner heat, a heavy heat, with something limitless in it, right in the crux of my being. Well, I panicked. You always tell yourself you're going to be brave, dignified, stoical. I ran wailing into the bathroom. I yanked open the triple mirror; the automatic scanlight came on with a crackle. I opened my eyes and stared. There I stood, waiting. Yes, I was clear, I was safe. I broke down and wept with relief. After a while Danuta helped me back into bed. We didn't try to make love or anything. No way. I felt too damn good. I lay there dabbing my eyes, so happy, so grateful-my old self again.