Who Goes There?

I don’t often get the chance to talk about authors not totally embedded in the realm of genre SF, which makes someone like Jonathan Lethem a bit of a treat. Lethem is nowadays known as a “literary” writer, with non-SF works like Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude gaining him a foothold in the literary crowd, if not exactly the mainstream. But unlike some other writers who started out writing genre who then tried distancing themselves from genre trappings, Lethem never forgot his roots. Indeed for someone who’s not primarily known as an SF writer, at least half of Lethem’s novels are SF, including his first four novels. He’s also unabashedly a Philip K. Dick fan, even going to far as to edit Dick’s Exegesis for book publication. Today’s story was published the same year as Lethem’s debut novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, and like that novel it wears its Dick influence on its sleeve—not in a bad way, of course.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Spring 1994 issue of Crank!, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted only once, in the anthology The Best of Crank! (ed. Bryan Cholfin). Much of Lethem’s short fiction has not been collected outside of anthologies, so this is not unusual.

Enhancing Image

This is a cautionary tales of sorts, about a salesman and an artist. The salesman is Pete Flost, and he sells robotic puppets to schoolkids. After school the kids swarm out like bugs and Flost, along with the competition, stands by with his trunk of merchandise. The puppets sell for very cheap, since they’re aimed at children—but that’s not where the money comes from. “Clients paid Desani and Sons large figures to equip the puppets with advertising programs, aimed at the buyers’ parents.” Flost works for Desani and Sons, who in turn work for advertisers. When in doubt, turn to ads. Flost has a digital wristband telling him his bank information; so do the kids. (Where do they get their money from? I would assume allowance.) The kids, like their adult counterparts, are fickle; they’re quickly learning how to think in a capitalist environment. Much to Flost’s dismay the turnout for his merchandise is underwhelming, and to make matters worse he then has to pay a ticket for speeding. Tellingly we’re not even told Flost’s name for the first few pages; he’s just “the salesman,” and indeed he’ll mostly be called that throughout the story. He’s a salesman down on his luck, and as a cog in the machine he’s not much more than that.

We cut to the artist, Zigmund Figment, who’s kind of a fraud, or as we say in a post-Hans Zimmer post-James Patterson post-Drake world, someone who makes art… with some uncredited help. That’s not the point. The irony is that despite being a salesman who sells “banal commercial narrative dolls” for a living, Flost is not a cynic; he means well. Meanwhile Figment is ruthlessly cynical—opportunistic, sure, but he also has open contempt for his own customers. It’s during a heated discussion with one of these customers that a random idea pops into Figment’s head: that he could make a killing selling something as cheap as disposable as those dolls. “There could be something there.” The dolls, acting alive but being non-sentient, are characters with their own programmed narratives, set to deactivate permanently after a 24-hour cycle. But suppose the character of one of these dolls was based on a person? And that’s how Figment comes into contact with Desani and Sons, and more specifically how he teams up with Flost—to use the salesman’s likeness for a doll Figment has in mind. The puppet salesman will serve as the basis for a salesman puppet.

On the one hand, this is a very Philip K. Dick story; it’s the kind of story he might’ve written had he lived through the Reagan years. I don’t mean this as a bad thing, even if it does smack of derivativeness. Lethem would move away from this heightened satirical brand of SF as he got older, and it’s not hard to see why; but also in some ways (though it pains me to say this as a fellow Dickhead) Lethem is a better writer than Dick. His sentences are less stilted and he’s able to pack almost a novel’s worth of detail into just a few pages, such that you could probably write a whole short story about just the dolls, but here they’re merely an accessory to the larger narrative. Dick was arguably the greatest critic of American capitalism among genre SF writers in his time, and Lethem continues this ruthlessness by presenting a shadowy and greedy landscape that lacks any semblance of spirituality—a film noir world without a detective. Flost is by no means a hero, but then Figment isn’t what you’d call a villain either; he’s merely a business-minded fellow who wants to take advantage of the system he was born into. He’s disgusted with the system (and with himself, really) but feels he has no power to change it. When Flost asks him why he’d wanna make a salesman puppet, Figment replies, “I’m looking for a medium that metaphorizes the temporal, presold, infantilizing, reflexive qualities of contemporary artistic expression, my own especially.” He knows it’s all a game.

“Mood Bender” is loose on plot but tight on character and substance; what it lacks in cohesion of events it makes up for in the density of its world and the sheer existential dread of its characters. Figment is a scumbag, casually rude to restaurant staff so he can get a discount, that sort of thing, but he’s also the man with the vision. That Figment is the assertive one of the two while Flost is weak-willed (a bit of a Willy Loman figure) speaks bleakly of both of them. Being an “artist” but not someone who wants to put in all the hours of work and solitude to make his art, Figment also hooks up with Ben Iffman, a friend of Flost’s and a designer for the puppets. “It wasn’t that Iffman’s designs necessarily sold more than anyone else’s, but handling them meant something to the salesman.” The problem is that this arrangement ends up working too well. Iffman catches on to Figment’s idea so fast he starts selling his puppets to the same clientele before Figment’s own plan can come to fruition. Without Iffman, and with his sales declining, Flost loses his job at Desani and Sons (although they don’t word it like that), and Figment for his troubles gets beat at his own game. As is typical of Lethem, the best laid plans of mice and men come to naught.

There Be Spoilers Here

Lethem asks a scary question: Are we somehow product? And if we’re product then does that mean we can be replaced? On his last day with Desani and Sons Flost is treated more like faulty machinery than a flesh-and-blood person who has to pay rent. Figment, who really always treated his art as both product and extensions of himself, gets what you might call his just desserts when people stop buying his shit. In the last stretch of the story, after both men have fallen from grace and been relegated to vagrancy, we see a robot priest—not sentient, but merely a machine that spouts pre-programmed platitudes. We have killed God—not with philosophy or even with machinery, but with dollars. The world in-story is in very bad shape. The only real refuge from this might be cold sleep, which curiously serves a similar function in Gun, with Occasional Music, as a kind of debtor’s prison. Run out of money and struggling to find a job? How about you slip into a coma. By the end of the story we’ve come back to the place we started at, with the schoolkids, only now Flost and Figment are drunkards poking fun at their own dashed hopes of success. Did I mention this is bleak?

A Step Farther Out

This is a good enough story that Lethem could’ve sold it to a higher-paying market—but then how many outlets published post-cyberpunk material like this in 1994? Lethem appeared in Asimov’s several times, but not in this case. Omni was on its way out. Interzone is British. There weren’t many markets for short SF at the time, which might be one reason Lethem hasn’t written much short SF; and when it came to novels he would eventually get to writing non-SF work, although the noir aspect very much remained. “Mood Bender” is short but brutal; it’s at times funny, but it’s by no means light reading. If you’re reading this then you’ve probably already ready some Lethem, but if not then it’s a good place to start.

See you next time.