Thomas M. Disch - Understanding Human Behavior

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Understanding Human Behavior

By Thomas M. Disch

He would wake up each morning with a consciousness clear as the Boulder sky, a sense of

being on the same wave length exactly as the sunlight. Innocence, bland dreams, a healthy

appetite -- these were glories that issued directly from his having been erased. Of course,

there were some corresponding disadvantages. His job, monitoring the terminals of a drive-in

convenience center, could get pretty dull, especially on days when no one drove in for an

hour or so at a stretch, and even at the busiest times it didn't provide much opportunity for

human contact. He envied the waitresses in restaurants and the drivers of buses their chance

to say hello to real live customers.

Away from work it was different; he didn't feel the same hunger for socializing. That, in fact,

was the major disadvantage of having no past life, no established preferences, no identity in

the usual sense of a history to attach his name to -- he just didn't want anything very much.

Not that he was bored or depressed or anything like that. The world was all new to him, and

full of surprises: the strangeness of anchovies; the beauty of old songs in their blurry Muzak

versions at the Stop-and-Shop; the feel of a new shirt or a March day. These sensations

were not wholly unfamiliar, nor was his mind a tabula rasa. His use of the language and his

motor skills were all intact; also what the psychologists at Delphi Institute called generic

recognition. But none of the occasions of newness reminded him of any earlier experience,

some first time or best time or worst time that he'd survived. His only set of memories of a

personal and non-generic character were those he'd brought from the halfway house in Delphi,

Indiana. But such fine memories they were -- so fragile, so distinct, so privileged. If only (he

often wished) he could have lived out his life in the sanctuary of Delphi, among men and

women like himself, all newly summoned to another life and responsive to the wonders and

beauties around them. But no, for reasons he could not understand, the world insisted on

being organized otherwise. An erasee was allowed six months at the Institute, and then he

was dispatched to wherever he or the computer decided, where he would have to live like

everyone else, either alone or in a family (though the Institute advised everyone to be wary

at first of establishing primary ties), in a small room or a cramped house or a dormitory ship in

some tropical lagoon. Unless you were fairly rich or very lucky, your clothes, furniture, and

suchlike appurtenances were liable to be rough, shabby, makeshift. The food most people ate

was an incitement to infantile gluttony, a slop of sugars, starches, and chemically enhanced

flavors. It would have been difficult to live among such people and to seem to share their

values, except so few of them ever questioned the reasonableness of their arrangements.

Those who did, if they had the money, would probably opt, eventually, to have their identities

erased, since it was clear, just looking around, that erasees seemed to strike the right

intuitive balance between being aware and keeping calm.

He lived now in a condo on the northwest edge of the city, a room and a half with unlimited

off-peak power access. The rent was modest (so was his salary), but his equity in the condo

was large enough to suggest that his pre-erasure income had been up there in the top

percentiles.

He wondered, as all erasees do, why he'd decided to wipe out his past. His life had gone sour,

that much was sure, but how and why were questions that could never be answered. The

Institute saw to that. A shipwrecked marriage was the commonest reason statistically, closely

followed by business reverses. At least that was what people put down on their

questionnaires when they applied to the Institute. Somehow he doubted those reasons were

the real ones. People who'd never been erased seemed oddly unable to account for their

behavior. Even to themselves they would tell the unlikeliest tales about what they were doing

and why. Then they'd spend a large part of their social life exposing each others' impostures

and laughing at them. A sense of humor they called it. He was glad he didn't have one, yet.

Most of his free time he spent making friends with his body. In his first weeks at the halfway

house he'd lazed about, eaten too much junk food, and started going rapidly to seed. Erasees

are not allowed to leave their new selves an inheritance of obesity or addiction, but often the

body one wakes up in is the hasty contrivance of a crash diet. The mouth does not lose its

appetites, nor the metabolism its rate, just because the mind has had memories whited out.

Fortunately he'd dug in his heels, and by the time he had to bid farewell to Delphi's communal

dining room he'd lost the pounds he'd put on, and eight more besides.

Since then fitness had been his religion. He bicycled to work, to Stop-and-Shop, and all about

Denver, exploring its uniformities. He hiked and climbed on weekends. He jogged. Once a

week, at a Y, he played volleyball for two hours, just as though he'd never left the Institute.

He also kept up the other sport he'd had to learn at Delphi, which was karate. Except for the

volleyball, he stuck to the more solitary forms of exercise, because on the whole he wasn't

interested in forming relationships. The lecturers at the halfway house had said this was

perfectly natural, and nothing to worry about. He shouldn't socialize until he felt hungry for

more society than his job and his living arrangements naturally provided. So far that hunger

had not produced a single pang. Maybe he was what the Institute called a natural integer. If

so, that seemed an all-right fate.

What he did miss, consciously and sometimes achingly, was a purpose. In common with most

fledgling erasees, there was nothing he believed in -- no religion, no political idea, no ambition

to become famous for doing something better than somebody else. Money was about the only

purpose he could think of, and even that was not a compelling purpose. He didn't lust after

more and more and more of it in the classical Faustian go-getter way.

His room and a half looked out across the tops of a small plantation of spruces to the highway

that climbed the long southwestward incline into the Rockies. Each car that hummed along the

road was like a vector-quantity of human desire, a quantum of teleological purpose. He might

have been mistaken. The people driving those cars might be just as uncertain of their ultimate

destinations as he was, but, seeing them whiz by in their primary colors, he found that hard to

believe. Anyone who was prepared to bear the expense of a car surely had somewhere he

wanted to get to or something he wanted to do more intensely than he could imagine, up here

on his three-foot slab of balcony.

He didn't have a telephone or a TV. He didn't read newspapers or magazines, and the only

books he ever looked at were some old textbooks on geology he'd bought at a garage sale in

Denver. He didn't go to movies. The ability to suspend disbelief in something that had never

happened was one he'd lost when he was erased, assuming he'd ever had it. A lot of the time

he couldn't suspend his disbelief in the real people around him, all their pushing and pulling,

their weird fears and whopping lies, their endless urges to control other people's behavior, like

the vegetarian cashier at the Stop-and-Shop or the manager at the convenience center. The

lectures and demonstrations at the halfway house had laid out the basics, but without

explaining any of it. Like harried parents, the Institute's staff had said, "Do this," and "Don't do

that," and he'd not been in a position to argue. He did as he was bid, and his behavior fit as

naturally as an old suit.

His name -- the name by which he'd christened his new self before erasure -- was Richard

Roe, and that seemed to fit too.

At the end of September, three months after coming to Boulder, Richard signed up for a

course in Consumership: Theory and Practice at the Naropa Adult Education Center. There

were twelve other students in the class, all with the dewy, slightly vulnerable look of recent

erasure. They sat in their folding chairs, reading or just blank, waiting for the teacher, who

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Thomas M. Disch - Understanding Human Behavior

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