John D. MacDonald

Cosmetics

Jason Blood sat in a deep chair in his study and for the dozenth time pressed the button in the chair arm which projected Carol’s letter onto the screen opposite him. The first projection had been a considerable shock, but with subsequent projections, in the light of his newly discovered loneliness, he found that he was able to view her animated face with the same contempt, the same amused contempt that he viewed all the others. But there was pain in it too, because she had been his wife for many years.

He stopped listening to the sense of her words and examined the structure of her face. He knew that it was Carol because of the identification medallion on the left side of her tunic. He realized that he was glad that, throughout. all of her autocosmetic changes she had retained a delicate bone structure around her eyes, at her temples. Not like some of the others who diverted themselves by frequently-shifting to the grotesque, making life a succession of masks — the lovely and the horrible, a spiced cookery of flesh and outlook.

He guessed that probably he had been misled by her conformity to what he liked in her — the tall leanness, the fragility and the wide, clear eyes.

But the letter was a refutation.

The face on the screen looked into his eyes. “I suppose I’m somewhat of a coward, my darling, in telling you this, way, but you see if I tried to tell you in person, you’d find some way to get around me.

“Do you remember when we were first married? You had none of these silly scruples about autocosmetics at that time. Our love was freshened by the rhythm of variety. Remember how I’d leave you a note telling you how I wanted you to look? Darling, you were such a wonderful succession of tall, strong men — and I tried so hard to make myself into all the types of beauty that you wanted to possess.

“But now these things which you mysteriously label ‘principles’ have come between us. You have made no change in four years, and. you talk about ‘solidification of personality’ instead of about what you can do to please me. Jason, darling, I don’t like the form you selected for yourself four years ago. By retaining it, you are not living up to your responsibilities as my husband. I hate that lean, ascetic face, the thinning Hair, the knobbed knuckles, the harsh look in your eyes.

“You seem to have lost all gayety. I am constantly making excuses to my friends. They consider you queer and reactionary. Our love needs freshening, my dear, and you refuse to help. I have done all that I can do. You take life too seriously, and you pay too much attention to that horrible Karl Dane and to your interminable discussion with him.

“So I am leaving you, Jason. I have found a man who is something like what you used to be, and I have instructed him on the autosuggestions you used so that he can look as you used to look. I will always pretend that he is actually you, my darling.

“Please forgive me, and when you decide that you have been wrong, I will come back to you.”

The vision on the screen faded. Jason Blood stood up and walked over to the wide window that looked across the terraced parks of the city. The bright afternoon sun shone on the couples and groups that strolled aimlessly along the paths. The men were all tall and incredibly handsome. The long-limbed women were the apex of the dream of beauty which had existed through the ages.

He cursed silently and turned away from the window. Where the others saw health and beauty, he saw only an incredible dullness. He smacked his bony fist into his palm. If only he could drop this thing in which he believed. The autocosmeton which Carol had used so frequently stood silently in a far room of the house. A constant temptation. If he could forget what he believed in, if he could subject himself to the machine, put on the disk of identification and then seek out Carol — see the new delight and the love in her eyes—

He heard footsteps approaching, recognized the heavy steps of Karl Dane, and smiled bitterly as he realized how close he had been to giving up what they both believed in.

Karl Dane was a big man with pads of flesh ground his small eyes, a mountainous belly and fat, freckled hands. He was an atrocity in a city of beauty.

He scowled at Jason, sat heavily in a chair and said: “Fenner has gone over.”

“No!”

“Yes. He got tired of fighting — tired of trying to beat into their thick skulls the fact that they’re killing the race. He turned himself into a pretty boy this morning and now he’s out roaming the city, beaming foolishly at the rest of them. What’s the matter with you?”

“Carol left me this morning,” Jason said flatly.

Karl chuckled? “Poor Jason! You thought she was different! didn’t you? I knew better. She’s like the rest of them. She just stuck around hoping that you’d change, that you’d decide to give up your silly ideas about being a savior of the race.”

“I don’t want to discuss it.”

“Don’t get touchy, boy. You and I can’t afford to quarrel. We’re the only two thinking beings left in the city.”

Jason felt his quick irritation slip away. He sat down and said helplessly, “Karl, we’re not getting anywhere. I’d like to get a sledge and smash every autocosmeton in the city.”

“And they’d kill you with a smile and rebuild them. I tell you, we’ve got to pick our recruits young and get them to sign a solemn pledge that they will never alter the faces and figures that God gave them. Then we’ll begin to get some place.”

“But Karl, we can’t offer them a thing except a shorter life.”

Karl Dane frowned heavily and stared at the wall. “For the last week, Jason, I’ve been doing research into how it all started. Maybe by backtracking we can find the answer. Let me give you the highlights.

“It started back in the mid-thirties of the last century. Maybe a little before. In 1933 C. L. Hull did some work on suggestibility. In 1938 H. F. Dunbar published a work called ‘Emotions and Bodily Changes’ — through Columbia University Press. F. A. Pattie did some work in 1941 on Hypnotic Suggestions. All that was the basic groundwork.

“In 1952 L. K. Bagwell published ‘Hypnosis for Anaesthesia and Hemorrhage Control, and got a lot of publicity. Then Labot, in 1955, stimulated by Bagwell’s work, applied hypnotic suggestion to healing and managed to gravity stimulate the growth of tissue. The early boys showed that by a concentration of the psychic processes, localized peripheral effects could be produced.

“With the drugs that Labot used, he could go far beyond mere peripheral effects — in fact, by a concentration of the psychic processes, he could cause internal tissues to part.

“You can see that all this was heading toward the question of hypnotism versus operative technique. But it wasn’t until 1964 that the suggestions to the patient in hypnosis could be adequately controlled. The four phases — anaesthesia, destruction of tissue, hemorrhage control and healing — were already in existence. With the development of better control of suggestibility, good hypnosurgeons began to do simple operations.

“They learned from these operations, and began to do more complex ones. The successes were startling, and manual surgery began to die out. Why weaken the abdominal wall with an incision when the patient himself can be forced to concentrate his psychic processes in such a manner as to destroy his own vermiform appendix and heal the surrounding tissue?

“Everything was just dandy until in 1965 the famous clinical case of a Mrs. R. M. occurred. Now this woman was as ugly as sin — so ugly that the mere fact of her ugliness was a matter of such great importance to her that under hypnosis the question of autosuggestion wasn’t entirely wiped out. During a hypnotonsilectomy her subconscious shot additional suggestions into the operation so that, after it was over, an outsize nose had been reformed, a low forehead had increased in height and a set of protruding teeth had turned back into a more normal position. Her own husband barely recognized her. She got a big publicity play and every haggard hag in the world started to scream for cosmetic hypnosurgery.

“Between 1965 and 1998 it is estimated that ten thousand cases a year of pure cosmetic surgery were handled. Co-ordinate with this accomplishment, if you want to call it such, were further advances in traumatic hypnosurgery so that all infectious and organic disorders were brought under control. The new era of international health had arrived. They began to work on the age problem, taking the old folks and, in a series of hypnosessions, regenerating the tired tissues arid turning them into youngsters. Folks still died of old age, even as they do today, but they died at a hundred and fifty and died looking like next year’s debutantes.

“All of the world’s billions clamored for attention and the richest men were the hypnotists — and the busiest. They coined money and power and set up lobbies to restrict the number of eager young people going into the field. Amateurs killed a lot of patients in clandestine sessions. They also turned out some monsters and the regularized hypnosurgeons refused to repair the damage, leaving the mobsters to roam around loose as a warning to those who wanted to take the chance of being operated on by amateurs. It was a mess.

“In 1998, International Motors came on the market with a crude model of what we know as the autocosmeton. The hypnotists tried to block it and nearly succeeded when a bunch of people gave the machine silly suggestions to read back to them under trance and it very properly killed them. A man named Therbolt invented the controls which today keep any cosmeton from reading back a killing suggestion. The early models worked just like the ones the fools use today. You decide what you want to look like from the booklet and read the code words to the machine. Then you take the receptivity drug, sit in front of it and watch the little rotating flashing gimmick. When you go under, the suggestions, along with the standard control suggestions, come, back to you and the concentrated psychic processes do the rest. In the early days you sat in the trance for twenty-hours and when you came out of it, the new tissue was still pretty tender, but, as you know, it’s only a three-hour job now. Take your pill and wake up with a new face and a new figure to go with it.

“It led to a lot of crime at first until the individual identity disks were made standard and the death penalty was invoked for going without your disk or with the wrong one.”

Jason sighed. “That’s all very nice and a good job of research, but it misses the point. The thing I’m interested in, Karl, is the opinions of the rebels.”

“Their opinions in the early days weren’t any different from ours. And they were just as helpless. I don’t know who noticed first that there were no new inventions, no new art, no virile literature. The world gradually switched over to a status quo setup, with all industry only concerned with maintaining the products already distributed. But it was Hanley in 2026 who gave us the reasons. Hanley was the first guy to get notoriety by refusing to change himself. Ugly beast he was, too. His theory was that the best part of the. human personality is conditioned by the face we present to the world. Our actions are in part a compensation for this static impression that we give. Thus, in a world where you can have a new face tomorrow and a new figure — provided you get tired of the old one — there was no incentive to force changes on society in compensation for the static impression that you gave to all people. Also he brought in the idea that much of our great art and literature were created by people who were seriously and hopelessly ill — conscious of their illness and striving for some sort of immortality. A subsidiary facet is the idea of increased longevity lessening the consciousness of the shortness of life, which in turn, has resulted in creation.

“We are in an era where the entire ego of the common man — and woman — is built around the idea of eternal change in outward appearance. Thus we have achieved a norm in personality that is deadly. There is no sublimation of dissatisfaction into creative channels. No invention, no art, no creative thought. Just maintenance. That’s all. The Age of Maintenance.

“A hundred years ago we thought we could reach the stars. We were well on our way. Atomic drives for space rockets and all the rest. What happened? The sad little men of fifty and sixty who were sweating out the details in labs suddenly discovered that they could be twenty again. A big, lush, brawny twenty with fine muscles and a handsome face. They didn’t want to take their beauty back into the lab. So they got maintenance jobs, a few hours a day. The same way with all other fields of endeavor. Makes me sick to my stomach. Where's our tremendous destiny that mankind used to talk about? Solidified According to them, we’ve got it. The lines of our cars and boats and houses and aircraft will never change. Just our faces.

“True, war went out with progress. But not for the same reason. Who’d want to become a soldier and take a chance on getting holes in that beautiful face. The soldier could regrow arms and legs that he might lose, but if he was killed it would cut short a hundred and fifty years of wonderful pleasure and admiration of self. Jason, the thing I hate about the world more than anything else is that it’s desolately dull. I guess we two are symbols of the past. Maybe we ought to turn pretty and get out and play with the girls — stop thinking, stop brooding, stop trying to put the big silly mass of mankind back on the tracks with full steam ahead.”

Jason smiled crookedly at him. “Are you going to emulate Fenner?”

“No. I just like to talk. I am worried, though. I’ve got a hunch my heart is going bad. I’m carrying too much fat around. I might die tomorrow. The instinct of self-preservation tells me. to take a few treatments and cut the fat and repair the heart and become pretty — and probably dull like the rest of them. Should I prostitute my ideals for the sake of personal safety?”

Jason felt quick concern. “Karl... maybe you ought—”

“Nonsense. I’d rather be dead than bored. Let’s get back to the point. What can a couple of vestigial remnants of the past like the two of us do to jiggle mankind out of the rut. You’ve tried to talk to them, haven’t you?”

“Sure. The young ones are the worst. Their education has been so much skimpier. You try to get a simple idea across and they look at you blankly. Then they say, Mr. Blood, why don’t you take a change? You talk so good that you ought to have the looks to go with it.’ ”

Karl sighed and stumped heavily to the window. He said, with disdain: “Look at ’em! Strutting like a bunch of prize roosters. They all look alike. Maybe this is the age of Duplication. I’ve got to get back, Jason. I’ve talked a young girl into coming around to my place at four. She seems brighter than most and I’m going to see if I can get her interested. Maybe if I can make her mad enough, she’ll start thinking.”

“Good-by, Karl.”

After the heavy man had left, Jason Blood was once again alone with his need of Carol, his thoughts of quiet desperation. To be so alone in a world where they were all so obviously contented, so oblivious to their own plight. He sank back in the chair, a lean, spindly man of less than average height, with the thin inbred face of a dreamer. He had copied the face and figure from an old text, from. a picture of one of the world’s famous philosophers. That was four years back. He wondered what seed of discontent there was in him which made it impossible for him to conform with the rest.

Through the open window he heard their voices. They laughed. They were very gay. Jason’s thoughts were close around him, like a small cloud of gloom in a bright world. A dying world. A worlds of the status quo.

As he sat, thinking, a tall girl tiptoed to the doorway and looked in at him. Her eyes were soft, but the line of her lips was determined. She was tall, and soft blond hair fell to her shoulders. Her features were regular and perfect. She wore a close-fitting tunic which crossed her breast leaving one shoulder bare. It stopped midway between knee and hip. She wore sandals of gold.

She looked at the back of Jason Blood’s head, and then beckoned to someone behind her. He came through the doorway, stepping as quietly as she. He was a tall Viking, his deep chest bare and symmetric. He looked troubled. He licked his lips and glanced at her. She nodded.

In his right hand he carried a short club made of rubber. He raised it and slammed it heavily against Blood’s head, just over the ear. As Blood slumped forward, the tall young man caught him.

He picked him up easily and. carried him out of the study, back through the house, Carol walking silently behind him. Tenderly he lowered Blood into a chair placed before a small austere machine.

He whispered: “Is the suggestion all set?”

“I did it this morning,” she said.

She took a hypodermic from a drawer of the machine arid with deft, practiced gesture, filled it and injected it cleanly into Blood’s upper arm. She waited a few moments and then slapped Jason Blood’s face smartly. He stirred and moaned. She compressed her lips and slapped him again. He opened his eyes drowsily and looked up at her. His eyes flicked from her face to the identity disk that told him that it was Carol.

“Carol!” he said thickly. “What—”

She flicked the switch on the machine and a brilliant light played on a small metal whirligig, like a toy, set in a frame near the top of it. Jason looked at it, and tried to look away, his face twisting with sudden alarm.

“No!” he said loudly. “No!”

But she ran her fingers through his thinning hair, and even as he spoke his eyes became glassy in the intensity of his stare at the whirling toy.

The voice, her voice, came from the machine. Soothing. Calm. Confident. “Jason. Blood, you are very sleepy, very sleepy, very sleepy, very sleepy, very—”

Carol took the young man’s arm and led him from the room. In the outer hall she said, “Thank you, John.”

“It means that I’m losing you, of course. Just when I’d found you. Carol, I wouldn’t have done it for anyone else.”

“I know that,” she said simply. “But it was the only way I could bring him to his senses.”

“If it doesn’t work, Carol, I’ll... I’ll be waiting.” He turned and left quickly. She stood for long moments in the hallway and then returned to the room where the autocosmeton droned quietly. She took a critical look at Jason, and then, feeling slightly ill, walked out of the room. It was very disquieting to look at the work in process. She took a scented shower and climbed into her wide, deep bed. She fell asleep with a small smile curving the corners of her mouth.

Jason Blood came slowly up out of deep sleep, a consciousness of vitality and strength making him yawn and stretch luxuriantly before he opened his eyes. He froze, his arms extended, his narrowed eyes looking at the dark and silent shape of the autocosmeton in front of his chair.

He had guessed, while awaking, that he had fallen asleep in his study; this was an entirely different part of the house.

What was it? Something about Carol — her fingers touching his hair, the bright revolving toy on the machine — dimly remembered, as something seen in a dream. He slowly lowered his arms, and, glancing down, saw with a touch of horror, that his lean pale arms were longer — thick, bronzed, evenly muscled. They weren’t his own hands. Stranger’s hands. Solid. Square. Well-formed, with long tapering fingers.

Could Carol have been responsible? Of course! He jumped up so quickly that he knocked the chair over. What a foul trick! Somehow, she had managed to get him out to. the autocosmeton. What would Karl say? The strange hand ran over his face, over unfamiliar planes and angles. He remembered that somewhere he had the original suggestion table which he had used four years before. He began to relax. It was simple. Merely give himself a second treatment and return to the familiar face and figure.

He would demand an explanation from Carol. His short tunic was uncomfortably tight. He hurried through the house, found her asleep in the bedroom. He looked down at her placid, sleeping face, feeling the drive of his need for her.

A huge mirror was built into the far wall. He was curious as to what Carol had done to him. He turned toward the mirror and inspected himself. He saw a man in his early twenties, over six feet tall, with enormously broad shoulders, a slim waist and a flat, tight belly. The arms and legs were smoothly and beautifully muscled. He was an even bronze tan. Dark blond hair curled crisply on his heads The face was good, a lean face with a quizzical look about the eyes, a touch of humor in the set of the mouth, slight hollows in the cheeks.

He arched his back arid expanded his chest, admiring the play of muscles, the construction of the superb body.

Young again! Alert and vital and full of the pure joy of healthy existence.

Carol stirred, opened her eyes and looked up at him. He saw the quick admiration after she had checked the identity disk pinned to the tunic which was no longer large enough.

“Darling!” she said softly.

He stood there and suddenly Karl Dane became a very distant and silly man who persisted in clinging to the past. This was the present! The eternal present!

Picking her up in his strong new arms, he walked with her to the wide window. Her head was on his shoulder and they looked happily down into the terraced parks of the city where, in the first gray of dusk, the wandering couples and groups made brilliant dots of color against the cool green.

“You’ve been away so long, my darling,” she said gently.

“I’ll never leave you again.”

Content

John D. MacDonald
Cosmetics