"Oh, were you?" he asked, amazed at his new perspective.
"Yes ... I wondered what you were doing at noon," the reactive machine opposite him on the couch said, expanding its shapely chest slightly.
"Good," the voice said, commending him for his perception.
"Dreaming of you, of course," he said to the flesh-clad skeleton behind the total gestalt Judy. The flesh machine rearranged its limbs, widened its mouth to denote pleasure. The mechanism searched through a complex of fears, hopes, worries, through half-remembrances of analogous situations, analogous solutions.
And this was what he loved. Anders saw too clearly and hated himself for seeing. Through his new nightmare perception, the absurdity of the entire room struck him.
"Were you really?" the articulating skeleton asked him.
"You're coming closer," the voice whispered.
To what? The personality? There was no such thing. There was no true cohesion, no depth, nothing except a web of surface reactions, stretched across automatic visceral movements.
He was coming closer to the truth.
"Sure," he said sourly.
The machine stirred, searching for a response.
Anders felt a quick tremor of fear at the sheer alien quality of his viewpoint. His sense of formalism had been sloughed off, his agreed-upon reactions bypassed. What would be revealed next?
He was seeing clearly, he realized, as perhaps no man had ever seen before. It was an oddly exhilarating thought.
But could he still return to normality?
"Can I get you a drink?" the reaction machine asked.
At that moment Anders was as thoroughly out of love as a man could be. Viewing one's intended as a depersonalized, sexless piece of machinery is not especially conducive to love. But it is quite stimulating, intellectually.
Anders didn't want normality. A curtain was being raised and he wanted to see behind it. What was it some Russian scientist—Ouspensky, wasn't it—had said?
"Think in other categories."
That was what he was doing, and would continue to do.
"Good-by," he said suddenly.
The machine watched him, open-mouthed, as he walked out the door. Delayed circuit reactions kept it silent until it heard the elevator door close.
"You were very warm in there," the voice within his head whispered, once he was on the street. "But you still don't understand everything."
"Tell me, then," Anders said, marveling a little at his equanimity. In an hour he had bridged the gap to a completely different viewpoint, yet it seemed perfectly natural.
"I can't," the voice said. "You must find it yourself."
"Well, let's see now," Anders began. He looked around at the masses of masonry, the convention of streets cutting through the architectural piles. "Human life," he said, "is a series of conventions. When you look at a girl, you're supposed to see—a pattern, not the underlying formlessness."
"That's true," the voice agreed, but with a shade of doubt.
"Basically, there is no form. Man produces gestalts, and cuts form out of the plethora of nothingness. It's like looking at a set of lines and saying that they represent a figure. We look at a mass of material, extract it from the background and say it's a man. But in truth there is no such thing. There are only the humanizing features that we—myopically—attach to it. Matter is conjoined, a matter of viewpoint."
"You're not seeing it now," said the voice.
"Damn it," Anders said. He was certain that he was on the track of something big, perhaps something ultimate. "Everyone's had the experience. At some time in his life, everyone looks at a familiar object and can't make any sense out of it. Momentarily, the gestalt fails, but the true moment of sight passes. The mind reverts to the superimposed pattern. Normalcy continues."
The voice was silent. Anders walked on, through the gestalt city.
"There's something else, isn't there?" Anders asked.
"Yes."
What could that be, he asked himself. Through clearing eyes, Anders looked at the formality he had called his world.
He wondered momentarily if he would have come to this if the voice hadn't guided him. Yes, he decided after a few moments, it was inevitable.
But who was the voice? And what had he left out?
"Let's see what a party looks like now," he said to the voice.
The party was a masquerade; the guests were all wearing their faces. To Anders, their motives, individually and collectively, were painfully apparent. Then his vision began to clear further.
He saw that the people weren't truly individual. They were discontinuous lumps of flesh sharing a common vocabulary, yet not even truly discontinuous.
The lumps of flesh were a part of the decoration of the room and almost indistinguishable from it. They were one with the lights, which lent their tiny vision. They were joined to the sounds they made, a few feeble tones out of the great possibility of sound. They blended into the walls.
The kaleidoscopic view came so fast that Anders had trouble sorting his new impressions. He knew now that these people existed only as patterns, on the same basis as the sounds they made and the things they thought they saw.
Gestalts, sifted out of the vast, unbearable real world.
"Where's Judy?" a discontinuous lump of flesh asked him. This particular lump possessed enough nervous mannerisms to convince the other lumps of his reality. He wore a loud tie as further evidence.
"She's sick," Anders said. The flesh quivered into an instant sympathy. Lines of formal mirth shifted to formal woe.
"Hope it isn't anything serious," the vocal flesh remarked.
"You're warmer," the voice said to Anders.
Anders looked at the object in front of him.
"She hasn't long to live," he stated.
The flesh quivered. Stomach and intestines contracted in sympathetic fear. Eyes distended, mouth quivered.
The loud tie remained the same.
"My God! You don't mean it!"
"What are you?" Anders asked quietly.
"What do you mean?" the indignant flesh attached to the tie demanded. Serene within its reality, it gaped at Anders. Its mouth twitched, undeniable proof that it was real and sufficient. "You're drunk," it sneered.
Anders laughed and left the party.
"There is still something you don't know," the voice said. "But you were hot! I could feel you near me."
"What are you?" Anders asked again.
"I don't know," the voice admitted. "I am a person. I am I. I am trapped."
"So are we all," Anders said. He walked on asphalt, surrounded by heaps of concrete, silicates, aluminum and iron alloys. Shapeless, meaningless heaps that made up the gestalt city.
And then there were the imaginary lines of demarcation dividing city from city, the artificial boundaries of water and land.
All ridiculous.
"Give me a dime for some coffee, mister?" something asked, a thing indistinguishable from any other thing.
"Old Bishop Berkeley would give a nonexistent dime to your nonexistent presence," Anders said gaily.
"I'm really in a bad way," the voice whined, and Anders perceived that it was no more than a series of modulated vibrations.
"Yes! Go on!" the voice commanded.
"If you could spare me a quarter—" the vibrations said, with a deep pretense at meaning.
No, what was there behind the senseless patterns? Flesh, mass. What was that? All made up of atoms.
"I'm really hungry," the intricately arranged atoms muttered.
All atoms. Conjoined. There were no true separations between atom and atom. Flesh was stone, stone was light. Anders looked at the masses of atoms that were pretending to solidity, meaning and reason.