The Simulacra Read Online Free Page B

yeah, be happy to,” Duncan said.
    Scuttling back out of the apartment, Stone left him alone with the TV set, his jug and the falsely corrected test papers, and his thoughts.

THREE
    One would have to go back to the year 1994, the year that West Germany entered the Union as the fifty-third of the United States, to understand why Vince Strikerock, an American citizen and an inhabitant of The Abraham Lincoln Apartments, was listening to der Alte on the television set while he shaved, the next morning. There was something about this particular der Alte, President Rudi Kalbfleisch, which always irritated him, and it would be a great thing when Kalbfleisch, in two more years, reached the end of his term and had, by law, to retire. It was always a great thing, a good day, when the law got one of them out of office; Vince always found it worth celebrating.
    Nonetheless, Vince felt, it was best to do all that was possible with the old man while he remained in office, and so he put down his razor and went into the living room to fiddle with the knobs of the TV set. He adjusted the n, the r and b knobs, and hopefully anticipated a turn for the better in the dire droning-on of the speech . . . however, no change took place. Too many other viewers had their own ideas as to what the old man ought to be saying, Vince realized. In fact there were probably enough other people in this one apartment building alone to offset any pressures he might try to exert on the old man through his particular set. But anyhow that was democracy. Vince sighed. This was what they had wanted: a government receptive to what the people said. He returned to the bathroom and continued shaving.
    “Hey, Julie!” he called to his wife. “Is breakfast about ready?” He heard no sound of her stirring about in the kitchen of the apartment. And come to think of it, he hadn’t noticed her beside him in bed as he had groggily gotten up this morning.
    All at once he remembered. Last night after All Souls he and Julie, after a particularly bitter fight, had gotten divorced, had gone down to the building’s M & D Commissioner and filled out the D papers. Julie had packed her things then and there; he was alone in the apartment—no one was fixing his breakfast and unless he got busy he would miss it entirely.
    It was a shock, because this particular marriage had endured for
six entire months
and he had become thoroughly used to seeing her in the mornings. She knew just how he liked his eggs (cooked with a small amount of mild Munster cheese). Damn the new permissive divorce legislation that old President Kalbfleisch had ushered in! Damn Kalbfleisch in general; why didn’t the old man turn over and die some afternoon during his famous two o’clock nap? But then of course another der Alte would simply take his place. And even the old man’s death wouldn’t bring Julie back; that lay outside the area of USEA bureaucracy, vast as it was.
    Savagely, he went to the TV set and pressed the s knob; if enough citizens pushed it, the old man would stop entirely—the stop knob meant total cessation of the mumbling speech. Vince waited, but the speech went on.
    And then it struck him as odd that there should be a speech so early in the morning; after all, it was only eight A.M. Perhaps the entire lunar colony had gone up in a single titanic explosion of its fuel depot. The old man would be telling them that more belt-tightening was required, in order to restock the space program; these and other quaint calamities had to be expected. Or perhaps at last some authentic remains of a sentient race had been unearthed—or was the term unmarsed?—on the fourth planet, hopefully not in the French area but in, as der Alte liked to phrase it, “one’s own.” You Prussian bastards, Vince thought. We never should have admitted you into what I like to phrase as “our tent,” our federal union, which should have been confined to the Western Hemisphere. But the world has shrunk. When