Free Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem Page A

swing, which I did, to be polite. We swung back and forth in silence for a while, then he asked if I wouldn’t mind urinating on him, though he put it more crudely. I was so taken aback that instead of refusing I asked him why. This agitated him. He got up and walked away, limping on his left foot and muttering to himself, probably about me. I looked around the park, glancing now and then at my left hand and foot, as you might at a purebred dog that you’ve recently been given and that has already bitten a few people. The fact that they were behaving themselves now, swinging quietly with me, was not at all reassuring. I remembered the events of the last few days and thought that in my head another mind lurked side by side with mine, a mind also mine yet inaccessible, which was worse than schizophrenia because you can be cured of that, and worse than the disease of St. Vitus because there all that can happen is that you dance, while I was condemned to a life of mad antics within. Patients were walking along the paths, some followed at a distance by an electric golf cart, probably in case the patient got tired. Finally I hopped off the swing to see if Dr. House had finished talking with Tarantoga and that’s how I met Kramer. He was riding piggyback on an elderly servant dripping with sweat and blue in the face because Kramer must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. I felt sorry for the servant but said nothing and stepped aside to let them pass, figuring that in my present situation I shouldn’t involve myself. Kramer, however, slid off the old man and introduced himself. Evidently interested in a new face. I couldn’t remember what my last name was supposed to be at the asylum though Tarantoga and I had agreed on one. All I could remember was the first name, Jonathan. Kramer liked my informality and asked me to call him Adelaide.
    He grew talkative. He’d been terribly bored since his depression lifted. The anguish had kept him from being bored. His depression, he explained to me, resulted from his inability to fall asleep if he first didn’t lie in bed and fantasize a while. In the beginning he pictured the stocks he bought going up and the ones he sold plummeting. Then he pictured having a million dollars. When he got a million, he pictured two, then three, but after five it lost its charm. He had to find new ground for his imagination. It was not easy, he said with a sigh. You can’t fantasize about what you already have or can obtain right away. For a while he pictured getting rid of his third wife without paying a cent in alimony, but then he managed to do just that. House still didn’t appear, and Kramer had got his hooks into me. For a while he used people he was mad at to fall asleep. But that was a mistake because such fantasizing fired up the hate inside him and then he had to take sleeping pills to fall asleep, but the doctors said he shouldn’t on account of his enlarged liver, so the only way then to get rid of the hate was to get rid of the objects of it. No, of course he didn’t hire some Mafia hit man, that kind of thing is strictly for the movies. He hired a real professional, and a hundred thousand dollars a throw was nothing. No, not killing, when you kill someone, you can’t really do anything to him. Nor did he derive any particular satisfaction from physical torture. An enemy or a competitor should be ruined, shown pity, and that’s the end of it. It’s like a corporate raid on the personal level. Kramer had an intellectual side, too, which he concealed from his fellow millionaires, he read books, even de Sade. A sad case, that! Fantasizing about impalement, flaying, and disembowlment while he sat in a hovel with nothing to pick on but flies. The poor have it easy! Everything lures the poor man, everything appeals to him. Every beautiful woman is beyond his reach. Which is why the porn industry does so well. Pneumatic women with pouting fat-lipped mouths, detailed descriptions of