Einstein's Monsters by Martin Amis Page B

a kid: toy-aircraft designs, send-in competitions, funnies, waffle and cookie recipes. But now? On the back of the high-fiber bran package there are dietary tips for avoiding cancer. On the back of the half-gallon carton of homogenized, pasteurized, vitamin D-fortified milk there are two mugshots of smiling children, gone, missing. (Have You Seen Them?). Date of birth, 7/7/79. Height, 3′6″. Hair, brown. Eyes, blue. Missing, and missed, too, I’ll bet—oh, most certainly. Done away with, probably, fucked and thrown over a wall somewhere, fucked and murdered, yeah, that’s the most likely thing. I don’t know what is wrong.

THE TIME
    DISEASE
    Twenty-twenty, and the time disease is epidemic. In my credit group, anyway. And yours too, friend, unless I miss my guess. Nobody thinks about anything else anymore. Nobody even pretends to think about anything else anymore. Oh yeah, except the sky, of course. The poor sky.… It’s a thing. It’s a situation. We all think about time , catching time , coming down with time. I’m still okay, I think, for the time being.
    I took out my hand mirror. Everybody carries at least one hand mirror now. On the zip trains you see whole carloads jackknifed over in taut scrutiny of their hairlines and eye sockets. The anxiety is as electric as the twanging cable above our heads. They say more people are laid low by time- anxiety than by time itself. But only time is fatal. It’s a problem, we agree, a definite feature. How can you change the subject when there’s only one subject? People don’t want to talk about the sky. They don’t want to talk about the sky, and I don’t blame them.
    I took out my hand mirror and gave myself a ten-second scan: lower gumline, left eyelash count. I felt so heartened that I moved carefully into the kitchen and cracked out a beer. I ate a hero , and a ham salad. I lit another cigarette. I activated the TV and keyed myself in to the Therapy Channel. I watched a seventy-year-old documentary about a road-widening scheme in a place called Orpington, over in England there.… Boredom is meant to be highly prophylactic when it comes to time. We are all advised to experience as much boredom as we possibly can. To bore somebody is said to be even more sanative than to be bored oneself. That’s why we’re always raising our voices in company and going on and on about anything that enters our heads. Me I go on about time the whole time: a reckless habit. Listen to me. I’m at it again.
    The outercom sounded. I switched from Therapy to Intake. No visual. “Who is it?” I asked the TV. The TV told me. I sighed and put the call on a half-minute hold. Soothing music. Boring music.… Okay—you want to hear my theory? Now, some say that time was caused by congestion, air plague, city life (and city life is the only kind of life there is these days). Others say that time was a result of the first nuclear conflicts (limited theater, Persia v. Pakistan, Zaire v. Nigeria, and so on, no really big deal or anything: they took the heat and the light, and we took the cold and the dark; it helped fuck the sky, that factor) and more particularly of the saturation TV coverage that followed: all day the screen writhed with flesh, flesh dying or living in a queer state of age. Still others say that time was an evolutionary consequence of humankind’s ventures into space (they shouldn’t have gone out there, what with things so rocky back home). Food , pornography, the cancer cure.… Me I think it was the twentieth century that did it. The twentieth century was all it took.
    “Hi there, Happy,” I said. “What’s new?”
    “… Lou?” her voice said warily. “Lou, I don’t feel so good.”
    “That’s not new. That’s old.”
    “I don’t feel so good. I think it’s really happening this time.”
    “Oh, sure.”
    Now this was Happy Farraday. That’s right: the TV star. The Happy Farraday. Oh, we go way back, Happy and me.
    “Let’s take a look at you,” I