The Simulacra Read Online Free PDF Page A

you are founding a colony millions of miles away on another moon or planet, the three thousand miles separating New York from Berlin did not seem meaningful. And god knew the Germans in Berlin were willing.
    Picking up the phone, Vince called the manager of the apartment building. “My wife Julie—I mean my ex-wife—did she take another apartment last night?” If he could locate her he could perhaps have breakfast with her and that would be cheering. He listened hopefully.
    “No, Mr. Strikerock.” A pause. “Not according to our records.”
    Aw hell, Vince thought, and hung up.
    What was marriage, anyhow? An arrangement of sharing things, such as right now being able to discuss the meaning of der Alte giving an eight A.M. speech and getting someone else—his wife—to fix breakfast while he prepared to go to his job at Karp u. Sohnen Werke’s Detroit branch. Yes, it meant an arrangement in which one could get another person to do certain things one didn’t like to do, such as cooking meals; he hated having to eat food which he had prepared himself. Single, he would eat at the building’s cafeteria; he foresaw that, based on past experience. Mary, Jean, Laura, now Julie; four marriages and the last the shortest. He was going downhill. Maybe, god forbid, he was a latent queer.
    On the TV, der Alte uttered, “... and paramilitary activity recalls the Days of Barbarism and hence is doubly to be renounced.”
    Days of Barbarism—that was the sweet-talk for the Nazi Period of the middle part of the previous century, now gone nearly a century but still vividly, if distortedly, recalled. So der Alte had taken to the airwaves to denounce the Sons of Job, the latest nut organization of a quasi-religious nature flapping about in the streets, proclaiming a purification of national ethnic life, etc. or whatever it was they proclaimed. In other words, stiff legislation to bar persons from public life who were odd—those born specially, due to the years of radiation fallout from bomb testing, in particular from the vicious People’s China blasts.
    That would mean Julie, Vince conjectured, since she’s sterile. Because she could not bear children she would not be permitted to vote . . . a rather neurotic connective, logically possible only in the minds of a Central European people such as the Germans. The tail that wags the dog, he said to himself as he dried his face. We in
Nord Amerika
are the dog; the Reich is the tail. What a life. Maybe I ought to emigrate to colonial reality, live under a faint, fitful, pale-yellow sun where even things with eight legs and a stinger get to vote . . . no Sons of Job, there. Not that all the special people were that special, but a good many of them had seen fit—and for good reason—to emigrate. As had quite a number of quite unspecial folk who were simply tired of the overpopulated, bureaucratically-controlled life on Terra these days, whether in the USEA, in the French Empire, or in People’s Asia, or Free—that is, black—Africa.
    In the kitchen he fixed himself bacon and eggs. And, while the bacon cooked, he fed the sole pet allowed him in the apartment building: George III, his small green turtle. George III ate dried flies (twenty-five percent protein, more nourishing than human food), hamburger, and ant eggs, a breakfast which caused Vince Strikerock to ponder on the axiom
de gustibus non disputandum
est—
there’s no accounting for other people’s tastes, especially at eight in the morning.
    Even as recently as five years ago he could have possessed a pet bird in The Abraham Lincoln, but that was now ruled out. Too noisy, really. Building Rule s205; thou shalt not whistle, sing, tweet or chirp. A turtle was mute—as was a giraffe, but giraffes were verboten, too, along with the quondam friends of man, the dog and cat, the companions which had vanished back in the days of der Alte Frederich Hempel, whom Vince barely remembered. So it could not have been the quality of