Flinging the papers aside, she tore off the bedclothes and struggled to her feet. Striding out of the clinic, Dragnie barely heard the astonished Doc Hastings cry, “What th—?”. She did not stop to reply. She had to find her plane, prepare it for flight, and return to New York. She shuffled in staggering steps down the dirt track toward the air strip, her thin hospital booties shredding against the loose stones and sun-baked ruts of the road. Behind her she heard Doc Hastings yell, “Dragnie! God damn it! Not again! Where are you going?”
“Home!” Dragnie shouted, not looking back.
“Where—New York? Bushwa. You’re in no shape to go anywhere, least of all to the airport in order to commandeer that twin-engine dual prop Cessna for an eight-hour solo flight back to Teeterboro! If you take off in that thing you will crash and die. Now get back here.” She did not heed his command. She did not stop and get back there. She did not do anything other than the thing that she did, which was to continue walking.
“Miss Tagbord?”
Out of nowhere, a figure had appeared. It was a young woman who had apparently run over to her from Ed Virility’s Bait ‘n’ Tackle Shoppe across the road, where Ed Virility, the nation’s top forensic ophthalmologist, had pioneered an important breakthrough in using fishing gear to conduct forensic ophthalmology and then refused to share it with the rest of either the forensic ophthalmology world or the fishing gear world. Dragnie walked on, examining the girl with a cursory glance but never breaking stride. The girl looked vaguely familiar. Her haircut, in a style no longer in fashion, reminded Dragnie of some similar style she had either seen or dreamed about years before. Her clothes—trim chino pants, showing off her slim shape to perfection; a loose white blouse accentuating her superb posture; the sensible flat shoes announcing their utter disregard for standard notions of feminine footwear—also looked like something Dragnie had seen in the past.
“Do you have a minute?” the young lady asked. “I’ve been dying to meet you. My name is—well, my real name is Phyllis Upp, but that is of no consequence. Don’t you know who I am?”
Dragnie marched on, fully determined to continue marching on. “Should I?” she said.
The girl smiled. “I’m you. I’m ‘Dragnie Tagbord.’ I play you here at the Gorge.”
Dragnie stopped. She turned and fully exposed herself to the sight of the young lady at whom her eyes were openly staring. It was only then that it struck her, that she was indeed looking at herself—or, rather, at herself as she had been ten years earlier. The young woman’s face resembled the younger Dragnie’s. Her hair, her clothes, her personal sense of individual style and her unique, kicky personality that made her one-in-a-million unique and someone people liked to be near, were identical to Dragnie’s of a decade earlier. “But you’re… perfect,” Dragnie breathed.
The girl smiled. “Yes, that’s how I’m playing you. As the perfect woman. As a fully conscious being who loves existence and maintains complete awareness in everything she does, says, and thinks.”
“Yes,” Dragnie replied. “That is exactly what I am.”
“I know it.”
“No, I know it.”
“Well,” the girl laughed, “I know it in a different way. You see, Miss Tagbord, I’m a work of art, and as such represent a re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. My depiction of you is an even more accurate depiction of you than is your depiction of you. I’m more you than you are you.”
“But how can you be sure?” Dragnie asked, as always supremely concerned with the truth of her self-knowledge. “How can you be certain that your depiction is accurate? Your metaphysical judgments represent opinions of purest subjectivity.”
“Not if they’re accurate,” the girl said. “Then they’re transformed from being subjective opinions to objective facts.”
“And how can you be sure your subjective opinions are accurate?”
“Because it’s not just me,” the girl smiled. “Everybody I talk to about you says, ‘Yes, that’s how she was—the perfect woman, supremely aware and with a volitional consciousness impervious to the influence of the so-called unconscious.’” The girl shrugged, as though stating something obvious and indisputable. “Their belief in your perfection proves it’s an objective reality. That’s why I’ve created an entire philosophical system based on my experience as an actress here at Glatt’s Gorge. I call it ‘Objectivismism.’ Its principle tenet is what I have just articulated: that one’s subjective opinions are, when also held by other men, elevated to the status of objective fact.”
Chuckling, Dragnie chuckled. “But… but that’s exactly how I’ve always felt, too,” she said. “Ever since I was fourteen. I read a book about demi-god heroes who announced their beliefs to each other as they triumphed over mortal enemies, and I thought, ‘This is how life should be—and would be, if my parents weren’t such moral cowards, and possessed the courage to see things as they really are, in black and white. If only I could be surrounded by people who think as I do, life would be perfect.’”
“Of course,” the actress said. “The more you’re surrounded by people who agree with you, the more you know your ideas are objectively correct.”
“May I ask you something?” Dragnie found herself saying. “I don’t know you but I sense that you can be trusted. Recently a man betrayed me. I am significantly older than he, and his unfaithfulness was with a much younger woman—a teenager, actually. And yet I know him to be a supremely rational, if still somewhat immature, young man. His actions seem to suggest that I am not enough for him. But how, if I am as perfect as you contend, can this be possible?”
The young woman playing “Dragnie Tagbord” chuckled. “That’s easy. It isn’t possible. It’s not that you aren’t enough for him. It’s that he isn’t enough for you. You’re too much for him. He betrayed you because you threaten him.”
Dragnie embraced the young woman and said, “Thank you, Phyllis. As an actress, you possess keen insight into human reality. What you just said sounds perfect. Which means it is perfect.”
Chapter 6
The Conversation of Talking People Saying Things
It took five days for Dragnie to regain sufficient strength and stamina to enable her to return to New York. During her convalescence she had directed Tagbord Rail from afar, communicating via telephone with her subordinates and conveying ideas from her mind into their consciousness via the power of human speech. She had also consulted with Glatt and his colleagues about the Peoples’ States of the People’s declaration of war, and Mr. Jenkins’s issuance of an arrest order for Glatt and the others.
“It makes no sense,” Dragnie had said. “Mr. Jenkins knows he is nothing more than an impotent puppet who serves at your pleasure. Why would he want to antagonize you?”
“The Strike is teaching Americans many things,” Glatt had explained. “It’s showing America that it can survive without jobs, without income, without tolerance, without opportunity, and without most of the rudiments of a modern civilization—which is to say, the very things guaranteed by government. All it takes is a willingness to redefine the word ‘survive.’ Sooner or later it will dawn on Americans that they can survive without government itself, and that a nation run by corporations, who are obedient to the demands and the rules of the market when they are not busy subverting or conspiring against them, is all that men need in order to live a life minimally acceptable to the mass of citizens and maximally desirable for the corporations themselves. Mr. Jenkins, as the Head Person of the government, knows this. He knows his job is in jeopardy. That is why he wants to arrest me and, indeed, all of us.” He had paused, and then added, “That is why we must avoid capture as we continue to press the Strike.”