This Perfect Day Read online

  She was silent.

  He sat up and looked despairingly at her rigid back. “It just slipped out,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She stayed silent.

  “It’s just a word, Anna,” he said.

  “You’re sick,” she said.

  “Oh, hate,” he said.

  “You see what I mean?”

  “Anna,” he said, “look. Forget it. Forget the whole thing, all right? Just forget it.” He tickled between her thighs, but she locked them, barring his hand.

  “Ah, Anna,” he said. “Ah, come on. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? Come on, let’s fuck again. I’ll suck you first if you want.”

  After a while she relaxed her thighs and let him tickle her.

  Then she turned over and sat up and looked at him. “Are you sick, Li?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, and managed to laugh. “Of course I’m not,” he said.

  “I never heard of such a thing,” she said. “ ‘Classify ourselves.’ How could we do it? How could we possibly know enough?”

  “It’s just something I think about once in a while,” he said. “Not very often. In fact, hardly ever.”

  “It’s such a—a funny idea,” she said. “It sounds— I don’t know—pre-U.”

  “I won’t think about it any more,” he said, and raised his right hand, the bracelet slipping back. “Love of Family,” he said. “Come on, lie down and I’ll suck you.”

  She lay back on the blanket, looking worried.

  The next morning at five of ten Mary CZ called Chip and asked him to come see her.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Now,” she said.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”

  His mother said, “What does she want to see you on a Sunday for?”

  “I don’t know,” Chip said.

  But he knew. Anna VF had called her adviser.

  He rode the escalators down, down, down, wondering how much Anna had told, and what he should say; and wanting suddenly to cry and tell Mary that he was sick and selfish and a liar. The members on the upgoing escalators were relaxed, smiling, content, in harmony with the cheerful music of the speakers; no one but he was guilty and unhappy.

  The advisory offices were strangely still. Members and advisers conferred in a few of the cubicles, but most of them were empty, the desks in order, the chairs waiting. In one cubicle a green-coveralled member leaned over the phone working a screwdriver at it.

  Mary was standing on her chair, laying a strip of Christmas bunting along the top of Wei Addressing the Chemotherapists. More bunting was on the desk, a roll of red and a roll of green, and Mary’s open telecomp with a container of tea beside it. “Li?” she said, not turning. “That was quick. Sit down.”

  Chip sat down. Lines of green symbols glowed on the telecomp’s screen. The answer button was held down by a souvenir paperweight from RUS81655.

  “Stay,” Mary said to the bunting and, watching it, backed down off her chair. It stayed.

  She swung her chair around and smiled at Chip as she drew it in to her and sat. She looked at the telecomp’s screen, and while she looked, picked up the container of tea and sipped from it. She put it down and looked at Chip and smiled.

  “A member says you need help,” she said. “The girl you fucked last night, Anna”—she glanced at the screen— “VF35H6143.”

  Chip nodded. “I said a dirty word,” he said.

  “Two,” Mary said, “but that’s hardly important. At least not relatively. What is important are some of the other things you said, things about deciding which classification you would pick if we didn’t have UniComp to do the job.”

  Chip looked away from Mary, at the rolls of red and green Christmas bunting.

  “Is that something you think about often, Li?” Mary asked.

  “Just sometimes,” Chip said. “In the free hour or at night; never in school or during TV.”

  “Nighttime counts too,” Mary said. “That’s when you’re supposed to be sleeping.”

  Chip looked at her and said nothing.

  “When did it start?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “a few years ago. In Eur.”

  “Your grandfather,” she said.

  He nodded.

  She looked at the screen, and looked at Chip again, ruefully. “Didn’t it ever dawn on you,” she said, “that ‘deciding’ and ‘picking’ are manifestations of selfishness? Acts of selfishness?”

  “I thought, maybe,” Chip said, looking at the edge of the desktop, rubbing a fingertip along it.

  “Oh, Li,” Mary said. “What am I here for? What are advisers here for? To help us, isn’t that so?”

  He nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Or your adviser in Eur? Why did you wait, and lose sleep, and worry this Anna?”

  Chip shrugged, watching his fingertip rubbing the desktop, the nail dark. “It was—interesting, sort of,” he said.

  “ ‘Interesting, sort of,’” Mary said. “It might also have been interesting, sort of, to think about the kind of pre-U chaos we’d have if we actually did pick our own classifications. Did you think about that?”

  “No,” Chip said.

  “Well, do. Think about a hundred million members deciding to be TV actors and not a single one deciding to work in a crematorium.”

  Chip looked up at her. “Am I very sick?” he asked.

  “No,” Mary said, “but you might have ended up that way if not for Anna’s helpfulness.” She took the paperweight from the telecomp’s answer button and the green symbols disappeared from the screen. “Touch,” she said.

  Chip touched his bracelet to the scanner plate, and Mary began tapping the input keys. “You’ve been given hundreds of tests since your first day of school,” she said, “and UniComp’s been fed the results of every last one of them.” Her fingers darted over the dozen black keys. “You’ve had hundreds of adviser meetings,” she said, “and UniComp knows about those too. It knows what jobs have to be done and who there is to do them. It knows everything. Now who’s going to make the better, more efficient classification, you or UniComp?”

  “UniComp, Mary,” Chip said. “I know that. I didn’t really want to do it myself; I was just—just thinking what if, that’s all.”

  Mary finished tapping and pressed the answer button. Green symbols appeared on the screen. Mary said, “Go to the treatment room.”

  Chip jumped to his feet. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Thank Uni,” Mary said, switching off the telecomp. She closed its cover and snapped the catches.

  Chip hesitated. “I’ll be all right?” he asked.

  “Perfect,” Mary said. She smiled reassuringly.

  “I’m sorry I made you come in on a Sunday,” Chip said.

  “Don’t be,” Mary said. “For once in my life I’m going to have my Christmas decorations up before December twenty-fourth.”

  Chip went out of the advisory offices and into the treatment room. Only one unit was working, but there were only three members in line. When his turn came, he plunged his arm as deep as he could into the rubber-rimmed opening, and gratefully felt the scanner’s contact and the infusion disc’s warm nuzzle. He wanted the tickle-buzz-sting to last a long time, curing him completely and forever, but it was even shorter than usual, and he worried that there might have been a break in communication between the unit and Uni or a shortage of chemicals inside the unit itself. On a quiet Sunday morning mightn’t it be carelessly serviced?

  He stopped worrying, though, and riding up the escalators he felt a lot better about everything—himself, Uni, the Family, the world, the universe.

  The first thing he did when he got into the apartment was call Anna VF and thank her.

  At fifteen he was classified 663D—genetic taxonomist, fourth class—and was transferred to RUS41500 and the Academy of the Genetic Sciences. He learned elementary genetics and lab techniques and modulation and transplant theory; he s
kated and played soccer and went to the Pre-U Museum and the Museum of the Family’s Achievements; he had a girlfriend named Anna from Jap and then another named Peace from Aus. On Thursday, 18 October 151, he and everyone else in the Academy sat up until four in the morning watching the launching of the Altaira, then slept and loafed through a half-day holiday.

  One night his parents called unexpectedly. “We have bad news,” his mother said. “Papa Jan died this morning.”

  A sadness gripped him and must have shown on his face.

  “He was sixty-two, Chip,” his mother said. “He had his life.”

  “Nobody lives forever,” Chip’s father said.

  “Yes,” Chip said. “I’d forgot how old he was. How are you? Has Peace been classified yet?”

  When they were done talking he went out for a walk, even though it was a rain night and almost ten. He went into the park. Everyone was coming out. “Six minutes,” a member said, smiling at him.

  He didn’t care. He wanted to be rained on, to be drenched. He didn’t know why but he wanted to.

  He sat on a bench and waited. The park was empty; everyone else was gone. He thought of Papa Jan saying things that were the opposite of what he meant, and then saying what he really meant down in the inside of Uni, with a blue blanket wrapped around him.

  On the back of the bench across the walk someone had red-chalked a jagged FIGHT UNI. Someone else—or maybe the same sick member, ashamed—had crossed it out with white. The rain began, and started washing it away; white chalk, red chalk, smearing pinkly down the benchback.

  Chip turned his face to the sky and held it steady under the rain, trying to feel as if he were so sad he was crying.

  4

  EARLY IN HIS THIRD and final year at the Academy, Chip took part in a complicated exchange of dormitory cubicles worked out to put everyone involved closer to his or her girlfriend or boyfriend. In his new location he was two cubicles away from one Yin DW; and across the aisle from him was a shorter-than-normal member named Karl WL, who frequently carried a green-covered sketch pad and who, though he replied to comments readily enough, rarely started a conversation on his own.

  This Karl WL had a look of unusual concentration in his eyes, as if he were close on the track of answers to difficult questions. Once Chip noticed him slip out of the lounge after the beginning of the first TV hour and not slip in again till before the end of the second; and one night in the dorm, after the lights had gone out, he saw a dim glow filtering through the blanket of Karl’s bed.

  One Saturday night—early Sunday morning, really—as Chip was coming back quietly from Yin DW’s cubicle to his own, he saw Karl sitting in his. He was on the side of the bed in pajamas, holding his pad tilted toward a flashlight on the corner of the desk and working at it with brisk chopping hand movements. The flashlight’s lens was masked in some way so that only a small beam of light shone out.

  Chip went closer and said, “No girl this week?”

  Karl started, and closed the pad. A stick of charcoal was in his hand.

  “I’m sorry I surprised you,” Chip said.

  “That’s all right,” Karl said, his face only faint glints at chin and cheekbones. “I finished early. Peace KG. Aren’t you staying all night with Yin?”

  “She’s snoring,” Chip said.

  Karl made an amused sound. “I’m turning in now,” he said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just some gene diagrams,” Karl said. He turned back the cover of the pad and showed the top page. Chip went close and bent and looked—at cross sections of genes in the B3 locus, carefully drawn and shaded, done with a pen. “I was trying some with charcoal,” Karl said, “but it’s no good.” He closed the pad and put the charcoal on the desk and switched off the flashlight. “Sleep well,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Chip said. “You too.”

  He went into his own cubicle and groped his way into bed, wondering whether Karl had in fact been drawing gene diagrams, for which charcoal hardly even seemed worth a trial. Probably he should speak to his adviser, Li YB, about Karl’s secretiveness and occasional unmemberlike behavior, but he decided to wait awhile, until he was sure that Karl needed help and that he wouldn’t be wasting Li YB’s time and Karl’s and his own. There was no point in being an alarmist.

  Wei’s Birthday came a few weeks later, and after the parade Chip and a dozen or so other students railed out to the Amusement Gardens for the afternoon. They rowed boats for a while and then strolled through the zoo. While they were gathered at a water fountain, Chip saw Karl WL sitting on the railing in front of the horse compound, holding his pad on his knees and drawing. Chip excused himself from the group and went over.

  Karl saw him coming and smiled at him, closing his pad. “Wasn’t that a great parade?” he said.

  “It was really top speed,” Chip said. “Are you drawing the horses?”

  “Trying to.”

  “May I see?”

  Karl looked him in the eye for a moment and then said, “Sure, why not?” He riffled the bottom of the pad and, opening it partway through, turned back the upper section and let Chip look at a rearing stallion that crammed the page, charcoaled darkly and vigorously. Muscles bulked under its gleaming hide; its eye was wild and rolling; its forelegs quivered. The drawing surprised Chip with its vitality and power. He had never seen a picture of a horse that came anywhere near it. He sought words, and could only come up with, “This is— great, Karl! Top speed!”

  “It’s not accurate,” Karl said.

  “It is!”

  “No it isn’t,” Karl said. “If it were accurate I’d be at the Academy of Art.”

  Chip looked at the real horses in the compound and at Karl’s drawing again; at the horses again, and saw the greater thickness of their legs, the lesser width of their chests.

  “You’re right,” he said, looking at the drawing again. “It’s not accurate. But it’s—it’s somehow better than accurate.”

  “Thanks,” Karl said. “That’s what I’d like it to be. I’m not finished yet.”

  Looking at him, Chip said, “Have you done others?”

  Karl turned down the preceding page and showed him a seated lion, proud and watchful. In the lower right-hand corner of the page there was an A with a circle around it. “Marvelous!” Chip said. Karl turned down other pages; there were two deer, a monkey, a soaring eagle, two dogs sniffing each other, a crouching leopard.

  Chip laughed. “You’ve got the whole fighting zoo!” he said.

  “No I haven’t,” Karl said.

  All the drawings had the A with the circle around it in the comer. “What’s that for?” Chip asked.

  “Artists used to sign their pictures. To show whose work it was.”

  “I know,” Chip said, “but why an A?”

  “Oh,” Karl said, and turned the pages back one by one. “It stands for Ashi,” he said. “That’s what my sister calls me.” He came to the horse, added a line of charcoal to its stomach, and looked at the horses in the compound with his look of concentration, which now had an object and a reason.

  “I have an extra name too,” Chip said. “Chip. My grandfather gave it to me.”

  “Chip?”

  “It means ‘chip off the old block.’ I’m supposed to be like my grandfather’s grandfather.” Chip watched Karl sharpen the lines of the horse’s rear legs, and then moved from his side. “I’d better get back to the group I’m with,” he said. “Those are top speed. It’s a shame you weren’t classified an artist.”

  Karl looked at him. “I wasn’t, though,” he said, “so I only draw on Sundays and holidays and during the free hour. I never let it interfere with my work or whatever else I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “Right,” Chip said. “See you at the dorm.”

  That evening, after TV, Chip came back to his cubicle and found on his desk the drawing of the horse. Karl, in his cubicle, said, “Do you want it?”

  “Yes,” Chip said. “Thanks. I
t’s great!” The drawing had even more vitality and power than before. An A-in-a-circle was in a corner of it.

  Chip tabbed the drawing to the bulletin board behind the desk, and as he finished, Yin DW came in, bringing back a copy of Universe she had borrowed. “Where’d you get that?” she asked.

  “Karl WL did it,” Chip said.

  “That’s very nice, Karl,” Yin said. “You draw well.”

  Karl, getting into pajamas, said, “Thanks. I’m glad you like it.”

  To Chip, Yin whispered, “It’s all out of proportion. Keep it there, though. It was kind of you to put it up.”

  Once in a while, during the free hour, Chip and Karl went to the Pre-U together. Karl made sketches of the mastodon and the bison, the cavemen in their animal hides, the soldiers and sailors in their countless different uniforms. Chip wandered among the early automobiles and dictypes, the safes and handcuffs and TV “sets.” He studied the models and pictures of the old buildings: the spired and buttressed churches, the turreted castles, the large and small houses with their windows and lock-fitted doors. Windows, he thought, must have had their good points. It would be pleasant, would make one feel bigger, to look out at the world from one’s room or working place; and at night, from outside, a house with rows of lighted windows must have been attractive, even beautiful.

  One afternoon Karl came into Chip’s cubicle and stood beside the desk with his hands fisted at his sides. Chip, looking up at him, thought he had been stricken by a fever or worse; his face was flushed and his eyes were narrowed in a strange stare. But no, it was anger that held him, anger such as Chip had never seen before, anger so intense that, trying to speak, Karl seemed unable to work his lips.

  Anxiously Chip said, “What is it?”

  “Li,” Karl said. “Listen. Will you do me a favor?”

  “Sure! Of course!”

  Karl leaned close to him and whispered, “Claim a pad for me, will you? I just claimed one and was denied. Five fighting hundred of them, a pile this high, and I had to turn it back in!”

  Chip stared at him.

  “Claim one, will you?” Karl said. “Anyone can try a little sketching in his spare time, right? Go on down, okay?”

  Painfully Chip said, “Karl—”