The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could

by Yxta Maya Murray

  Carver managed this miracle by marshaling the powers of eminent domain and also cultivating synergies between both federal and local governmental pub/pri organs—the hospitals, the police, the housing authorities, sanitation departments, and, increasingly, jails and immigrant camps. Every few months, whenever Carver needed the Secretary’s approval for a new merger, he’d fly up to DC. He marched through our offices, his warm brown eyes shining as he chattered about setting up ICE and Marshal satellites in the surviving remnants of the Publics or setting up trial-balloon administrative guidelines on child labor.

  “Don’t miss the boat on this, Gwen,” Carver would enthuse to the Secretary, smacking his hand on her desk. “This is going to be a game changer.”

  “I’m sure it will be,” she’d reply, smiling at him indulgently. “But not everybody likes to move as fast as you do.”

  My job was to do the paperwork that leveraged our programs off the ground. I had to keep in mind advances in constitutional law, administrative law, and the less-dynamic international treaties, while always balancing the ROIs so that the human outlays and deficit issues would never become so overwhelming that Congress would shut us down—but that was unlikely anyway. At the Agency, we kept a keen eye on the Overton Window, that concept developed by Joseph P. Overton (deceased) of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which alerts to the range of ideas currently permitted to be spoken aloud in political discourse. If reforms are too radical, they stray outside the allowable aperture, and censorship is likely to follow. So we always took care to curb Carver’s more fanciful ideas, such as his Adversative version of the “I Am” and “Listening” Exercises, which employed intense images and fluids. As in all government institutions that harbor visionaries, we had to protect him and us from punishing budget cuts and troublesome social movements and insurrections.

  Still, the Overton Window seemed to be rapidly expanding. Since the Second and then Third Emergencies in ’22–’24, and our resulting new twelve-member Supreme Court, there had been a host of alterations in the legal and educational landscape. Roper v. Simmons had been overruled, to be replaced with Cruz v. Macias, allowing capital punishment for minors. Then, there’d been the striking down of Graham v. Florida and its substitution with Adams v. Texas, permitting mandatory LWOP for under eighteens. The national educational platform also reacted to the butterfly effects of the cut in the corporate tax to 4 percent and the release of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, which together created an exodus that flooded the already filled-to-bursting public schools and generated more shootings, stabbings, possibly or probably rapes, and other related problems.

  A multiplicity of previously unheard-of new regulations began to cross my desk, and it was my task to see them fulfilled according to the rule of law and best practices. During these long, long years, when Carver began to recede from everyday view and explicit influence, I will admit that I myself had to work on my own personal Overton Window. Sometimes, the practicalities that I was saddled with executing seemed initially vile and flat-out disgusting, at least from the vantage of the girl who had once worked so hard to teach kids their ABCs in Wisconsin. When I read the new US Guidelines on schools’ use of corporal punishment after the National Relaxation, for example, I had a brief nervous episode that saw me running across the Mall in a panic. I consulted my psychologist (recommended by the Secretary), who helped me destimulate with biofeedback processes and a new regimen of vitamins and mineral packets.

  When the Secretary ordered me to effectuate Carver’s early-regime recommendations for allowing the charters to block LGBTQ kids, I once again glitched, taking to bed with “the flu” for three days. I’d had friends in my youth, during my own high school days, whom I had cared for deeply, and their memories made my coordinates temporarily swing shut. I finally came back to work only after another adjustment in my biofeeds, which allowed me to type up the paperwork, reams and reams of it. By the time I’d finished drafting and line-editing the five-hundred-page report, I found that my Overton Window had expanded to allow in the necessary light.

  There were other episodes like this, though they seemed to decrease with the years. When the Secretary winnowed Non children from White charters in ’31, I spent at least a week fighting off a thick, spiritual sickness that seemed to cling to my lungs and my very skin, but then I submitted the issue to a complete cost-benefit breakdown and almost never worried about it again. By the time the Secretary tasked me with setting up UNCRC-compatible furnished camps for Mexican and other Hispanic minors in the wake of the ’33 Wall and the Puerto Rico catastrophes, I had worked with the Masters Level (Gentle) “I Am” and “Listening” protocols and also, with my doctor, tailored my self-nourishment calibrations. These measures helped me power through my workload and kept my Window in good working order.

  Far before Carver’s monoculture disruptions wholly transformed the American educational landscape, though, he made an unexpected decision. The Secretary had invited him to the post of undersecretary, which was a training ground for the head position itself. But he declined. Carver asked instead to withdraw from national policy and take over the territory of Landingsburgh, a good-sized but bankrupt Midwest city with considerable street-violence issues and a nearly destroyed school system. He wanted to set up a Next Gen experimental holistic organism known as the “Consolidated Academy,” which would integrate all organizational components so that the educational infrastructure connected to the total ecology of a distressed metropolitan area. That’s the way he explained it anyway, in one of the lengthy emails I was cc’d on, and I can’t say that I understood exactly what he was talking about. The Secretary was not impressed either, at least at first. But when he threatened to quit government work entirely and move into private enterprise, she relented.

  So Carver moved away from the capital to Landingsburgh, and in ’28–’29, he set up his new system. He presided reportedly over two to three hundred schools all across the region, arranging with the Secretary to develop his Growth Model with “all necessary space and freedom” (so he wrote). This, he insisted, required that public and even in-house access to the mechanics of his stewardship should be restrained. He wrote us increasingly lengthy emails, wherein he argued that the only way data confidentiality could be assured would be if his mission were allocated a Sensitive Classification with an accompanying alteration in the criminal code regarding complaints against his didactics and other forms of civil unrest.

  The Secretary allowed this mod on a six-month trial. She then extended it in perpetuum when his numbers across all benchmarks leapt by 67 percent and the top brass of his civic copartners in HHS, ICE, and BOP (I lost track of all of them) sent us glowing reports on his contributions. I helped out with most of the licenses—the installation of a small judicial firm at his Consolidated Academy, for example, and his waiver permitting partnerships with disciplinary and immigration sectors. Still, the Sensitive Classification allowed Carver to hammer out many of the finer details himself.

  The whole project was a success. Landingsburgh itself soon began to flourish, with pioneers from Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and other major cities moving to the area, encouraged by the city’s auctioning of abandoned houses and rapidly increasing work opportunities. Carver’s influence spread to other vectors as well, and I heard of even more lucrative syntheses of unclear origins and specifics, which were easily authorized once crime statistics in the city fell to the lowest bracket in the country.

  It was now ’38, and while we on the Hill bare-knuckle brawled with the small remaining gangs of House Democrats and protest cells, Carver had remained in Landingsburgh all this time. He stayed away from DC because he was a perfectionist who would never leave his life’s work, the Secretary explained to me in a low, admiring voice, on those nights when we stayed late at the office and she’d share her rare confidences. He’d dedicated himself to refining his methodologies and optimizing an efficiently faithful pedagogy, she went on. He was the cat’s meow, and he was the
bee’s knees—and that remained her fixed idea of him until she’d started to hear the rumors about the shift in his demeanor and the tone of his emails changed.

  That’s when she’d called me into her office and ordered me to go to Landingsburgh and report back on what I found.

  I came home from my meeting with the Secretary and began to pack for my trip and get read into the assignment. My plane would take off the next morning, so after I’d cooked dinner for my family, tucked in the kids, and had a special cuddle with Sheraton, I spent the deep evening hours looking through Carver’s file. All in all, the documents on the whiz drive the Secretary had given me totaled about seven thousand pages. A lot of them had been cc’d to his assistant, a substeward named Melinda Gerber, who had taken over communications with the Secretary at least two seasons ago. The other materials gave essential details on Landingsburgh and assorted minutiae concerning infrastructure, sewage and security contracts, teacher’s wages, etc.

  I took a quick look at the old maps of Landingsburgh in Appx F of the file, which for some reason had not been updated with more recent charts. Landingsburgh radiated around a corporate downtown, which was half-circled by a series of neighborhoods. Perhaps its most prominent feature was the massive, multicomplex prison system that filled the western quadrant of the city and could house upward of thirty thousand units. The elegant, boxy, and well-equipped LFDC had been built in the style of Le Corbusier and commissioned upon Reagan’s Executive Order 12292 after the ’85 floods and consequent riots.

  I turned from these materials and spent the rest of my time on Carver’s correspondence with the Secretary. A missive early in ’24 seemed to set out his general philosophy:

  . . . and if we have the bravery to make the hard choice, we might recalibrate the curriculum to institute the values of tenacity, joy, and optimism that will return these needful generations to the bounty of industry that is their national inheritance.

  In ’27, he seemed to have deepened his commitment to privatization:

  . . . the state is not equipped to truly look after the welfare of the country’s youths. But the invisible hand was designed to be swift and accurate in its solutions, if not to crush inefficiency with the same brutal economy as nature herself. As I have said to you repeatedly, the market is a machine for living, not for wasteful and hypocritical proselytizing.

  But by ’33, his writings seemed to have become accented with the melancholia that the Secretary had alluded to in her briefing with me:

  I stared all day out the window, thinking of the paths that have led me here. Melinda chats merrily of my past successes, but the route I took toward this destiny remains shadowy and filled with failures. At the end of the day, I know that I’ve made men out of boys and women out of girls, but I must learn not to expect any thanks.

  His last message, four months back, was only one baffling line:

  Eliminate the externalities.

  The next morning, I boarded my flight to Landingsburgh and touched down two and a half hours later. As I possessed a government pass that gave me Special Assignment Status, I moved swiftly enough past the blockades that the Academi police had set up at all ports of entry in response to coordinated riots in Union City, Georgia, and Boyle Heights, California. I was also met by an armed escort. This man, named George Underhill, was tall, thin, White, dark-haired, and approximately twenty-six to thirty years old. In lieu of the suit-and-tie uniform of DC scholastic administrators, he wore a black jumpsuit of immaculate and very plain design, which he’d decorated only with a plastic badge bearing his name and a picture of his face.

  “Hello, ma’am,” George said in a low, astonishingly beautiful, and honey-dark voice, while grabbing my bags and quickly maneuvering me into a black sedan. “We heard you were coming and trust you had a good flight.”

  “I’m here to see Carver ASAP and get a briefing on his progress,” I said briskly, settling into the back seat while he lumped my bags next to him in the front seat and took his place behind the wheel.

  George did not answer me. He only pulled away from the airport and began to drive us toward the city on smoothly trafficked freeways.

  I had never been to Landingsburgh before, but I had heard horror stories about it. In the ’90s, the city had been overwhelmed by encampments and languished from a devastated corporate center that was ringed by the dilapidating neighborhoods. The only architecture of note was the city’s famous prison complex and its former Art Deco glories that now littered downtown. Most everything in the financial and higher-income sectors had been burned in the fires that had followed the ’80s flood. As I leaned back in the car seat, checking the Eyes Only National Data on my phone and unsuccessfully attempting to make small talk with George about Carver’s health, I gazed out the window at the slowly changing landscape, expecting to be greeted by wastelands and slums.

  I was pleasantly surprised. Just outside the airport, we passed a delightful green space, filled with trees and parkland that looked usable by families. I detected no blighted townscapes, no tent cities. Instead, past the parks, I saw unmistakable signs of prosperous small businesses and trim, tidy homes that appeared very well cared for. The suburbs gave way to corporate districts that also looked populated and busy and were ornamented by shrubs, flower beds, and glossy green trees that shone under the state’s uncertain weather.

  “Landingsburgh’s looking good, better than I thought it would,” I said.

  George nodded his head encouragingly but said nothing.

  “I’m speaking to you, boy,” I said. “Don’t you answer?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” George said, flustered. “I didn’t realize that was a direct question.”

  “I’m saying I thought that Landingsburgh had more rough edges,” I said.

  “Carver accounts for our prosperity as an example of virtuous circles, ma’am,” George said, in his deep and very polite voice, while looking at me intently with large clear eyes that reflected in the rearview.

  “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, you’d have to read Carver’s writings about it,” George said. “He’s the one who knows about all that. And I don’t want to talk out of turn.”

  George continued driving. We passed another tidy suburb and pocket of well-oiled industry. Then came a long stretch of vacant land, stripped down to red dirt. Men in hard hats scurried back and forth on the area, and I saw trucks, backhoes, bulldozers, loaders.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Car industry’s coming back,” George explained.

  At around the center of the city, I was again astonished. I knew from my brief study that Landingsburgh’s incinerated business district had hosted once-stunning but now-shattered Albert Kahn and Charles Noble–designed arcades. But instead of seeing ruins, I descried a cleared area bounded by a chain-link fence and occupied by miles upon miles of parking lots. Shining, small cars filled the spaces. Non attendants or crossing guards, who all wore green jumpsuits, were stationed every five hundred feet or so. And many people wearing jumpsuits of varying colors wandered to and fro, coming back to their cars to drive home or heading deeper inside.

  “Is this one of those huge malls?” I asked, looking up through the car window. In the wide span of the gray and cloud-dusted sky, I saw suddenly a curl of what seemed to be dark haze or some sort of black, spiraling smoke, which I wrote off as the product of a nearby refinery. “Why is everyone wearing the same kinds of clothes?”

  “That’s our uniforms. This is the schoolyard parking lot, ma’am,” George said.

  “Schoolyard? But why is it so big? There are at least three hundred schools all over the city.”

  “Isn’t it normal size?” George’s face remained placid and amiable as he maneuvered the car toward the entrance of one of the lots. Its gate opened out into a small sentry station employed by young, green-suited Non guards who waved us in once George flashed him his badge.

  George drove us through the seemingly endless
lot. I saw that the space was cut through by a serpentining track, which carried electric red-and-white cars that picked up the jumpsuit-clad workers at regular intervals. But George did not park and lead us to a tram stop. He continued driving through the forest of vehicles, which ended eventually in the outskirts of a large and pretty campus that had its own small roads leading to buildings boasting fresh white paint and red-tiled roofs. Children in blue jumpsuits played beneath trees or in posh playgrounds, while adults in pink jumpsuits watched on. Non sanitation workers in yellow suits bustled along, sweeping; Non maintenance workers wearing purple suits attended to a utility pole and its cables; other employees exited a nearby tram and walked in varying directions with steady gates and purposeful miens. George continued maneuvering us past this lively, pastoral scene until we reached one of the red-tiled buildings. A woman in a gray jumpsuit and a long fall of ash-blond hair waited on the curb for us, waving as we pulled up.

  George stopped the car, ran to my side, and opened my door. I got out.

  “Mrs. Eager,” the woman said, stretching out a hand. She had round, glowing cheeks and bright white teeth and was perhaps twenty-eight, twenty-nine years old. “We heard you were coming and hope you had an excellent flight.”