Eminent Domain

by Carl Neville

  Of course, but, well, but dig a little deeper and the world collapses…

  Dig a little deeper and all worlds collapse.

  Yes true. The trick is to get them to collapse into each other. Rather than in on themselves.

  Sorry, Julia says, what’s the Hungarian Document?

  ROD GUIDE TO THE PRB

  INSTITUTE: INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION

  CATEGORY: HISTORY

  Video/The Iron Laws: David McGee in Conversation with Professor Harold Manstam of the North Academy/Excerpt/ “The Hungarian Document”

  Black-and-white montage of workers massed in squares, key political figures of the 1950s.

  McGee (V.O.)

  The Hungarian Document is the generally used title of a two-page essay, author unknown, that emerged from the Budapest Circle, an informal grouping of political economists based in the University there and which began to circulate in samizdat form in the late 1950s, reaching the highest level of the politburo and causing intense debate at all levels of society both in the former USSR and elsewhere, ultimately forming the basis of many calls for reform both within and without the party structures. Credited with causing an intellectual crisis at a crucial moment in the early stages of the post-Stalin thaw, the Hungarian Document is widely regarded as a key work of “speculative political economy”, seized on by Eurocommunists, social democrats, and socialists alike all across Europe. It has been characterized in a somewhat light-hearted manner by Professor Wilbers as “the single most important historical document since the Bible, but thankfully much shorter”.

  Cut to McGee in studio, to camera.

  McGee

  Here to discuss it with me is the current acting chair of the Historical Materialism department at the North Academy in Glasgow, Dr Harold Manstam. Welcome. So perhaps the first question should provide an overview. What exactly does the Hungarian Document predict?

  Manstam

  The Hungarian Document’s speculation is twofold. First it analyses the trajectory of the post-war liberal capitalist economies. Second, it focuses on the underlying contradictions of the centralized production system of the USSR. Yes. So the Aitch-Dee, as it’s known, looked at the West and said: here is what will happen to your full employment model, eventually you will get a wage-price spiral and rising militancy from workers, and capital will have to break the shackles of the nation state and relocate production elsewhere in order to maintain profitability, abandoning the centre for the periphery. In the wake of this, in order to maintain living standards, it will rely on debt, a situation which will itself break down at some point when the debt becomes unsustainable.

  McGee

  Raising the question of course of how it will attempt to achieve this and what methods might be employed to prevent it doing so.

  Manstam

  Precisely.

  McGee

  And with regard to the Soviet Union: it anticipates crisis there too?

  Manstam

  Yes, though there its argument is somewhat different.

  Julia is asleep in the next pod. He can almost hear her breathing. Perhaps he should go in there, lie beside her. Seize the moment.

  His ROD buzzes and he moves quickly to mute it. It’s the highest tone, a repeated alert, and he knows what that means. The Work Department.

  Perhaps it was the Dev. She wasn’t used to it. They had kissed perhaps out of politeness in a way. She had difficulty adjusting to the pharms. Still, boldness was what was needed, perhaps. Dominic had been bold, whereas he…

  The ROD buzzes again, he presses mute again, holds it long enough for it to work this time, checks the message. He doesn’t want to, can’t think about work right now, but his commitments have accumulated, and his ROD is going to keep pinging him with increasing frequency until he arranges something. If he doesn’t make an arrangement straightaway it will automatically disable and he’ll have the privileges he needs to transport Julia around suspended, which would certainly put a dampener on things. He looks to trade off his hours again in a grey exchange but gets a blue code warning back, they are onto him. What a bother, he should have fulfilled his duties earlier but has been so caught up in preparing for Julia, the Games.

  He goes into the Work Department noticeboard on his ROD, clicks to see if he can take something tomorrow or the day after while Julia is talking to Gillespie. There is a four-hour block helping to refurbish some flats around the corner, SE16, so that’s handy. He nominates himself, waits, hopes he hasn’t left it too late, should be an automatic twenty-four-hour service, though he has noticed things seem to be slowing down, maybe it’s his ROD, needs tuning.

  A slight panic, he remonstrates with himself, shifts, uncomfortable and legs hot suddenly in the bed. Fingers crossed, the confirmation is quick, if not and his ROD disables he will have to go into one of the Workfare offices and sign up for an immediate detail before he can get back minimal access. If he doesn’t do that he will be on subsistence allocation until he works it all off and if he doesn’t comply with that then he’s dependant on the largesse of the voluntary time-banks and the third sector and other organizations for the non-mutual distribution of surplus. Perhaps he should, for a moment he almost contemplates it, go completely off-ROD, as many do. Live in the cabin he is due to take Julia out to, grow his own food, tend to the sensors, do nothing but listen to, manipulate, the plastic, mountainous flow of sound they are creating, make his own small contribution to that beautiful evanescence. Avoid all this complexity.

  Still, for the next forty-eight hours he will have her to himself. And boldness is what’s required. They will go out to the Circuit tomorrow then the Farm. He reaches for a Dev to help him sleep. Boldness, if only there were a pill for that.

  Tom holds up an Affective Monitor.

  Yes, it helps us to adjust our approach in service situations, allows us to make sure people stop when they have had enough, find out what kind of work they are suited to and so on, very helpful in all kinds of ways this little device, he waggles it back and forth, rummages in the box, there’s also, he says, this version, he laughs, two balls on long springs and a flexible semi-circular plastic strip. Ah, he says, let me introduce you to the delights of the Affective Deely-Bopper. They started out as toys, he says, but had such obvious advantages in reducing stress and workloads, in, he searches for the words, smoothing out interactions.

  She doesn’t seem to want one, looks distracted instead by the group of Enthusiasts they passed on the way in.

  He tries to be interesting, informative, finds he’s blathering.

  The advantage is that it takes it out of your control, it says, whether I like you or not, whether I am attracted to you or not, is nothing to do with me. And if we see someone with a low count, it gives us the opportunity to try and get it up, plus, there’s a series of co-operative food places where if you can get the staff’s A-monitor up to 100 they will give you free food, of course the staff are very obliging and so they try to be as happy as possible for you, which has led to affective burnout, it got a little tiring for all parties. So now we just discreetly monitor, try to be as little trouble as possible, and a force for good where we can be.

  He’s rambling, why is he rambling? He should stop. All this excitable talk is off-putting, especially when Americans seem so relaxed and languorous.

  She puts the A-monitor back in the box with a polite smile. Ah, he says, going no-badge. That has its own connotations, of course. They move toward the entrance, deposit their coats with the middle-aged man in the cloakroom, his own A-monitor a slightly faded pink.

  Thank you. He turns and finds Julia has been swept away through the doorway and into the first of the rooms, then rapidly through into the second. They are going for a run-through. He doubles back and walks around the building, gets to the back exit just in time to see them laughing, jumping into a taxi.

  Kidnapped. Her coat! He goes back to the cloakroom to get it from the attendant, A-monitor touching bottom level now, shift nearly over, who lo
oks surprised at his being back so soon.

  Kidnapped! he says.

  Yes, the attendant says. A half-ironic smile that lifts his hangdog expression a little, sends the A-monitor bars a few levels higher as he reflects on the moment further. I saw.

  Well. She’s still got her ROD in that little bag she carries. Well. Something, some inner tension breaks and he smiles then laughs a little. Everything, the whole universe it seems, is conspiring to keep them apart, some benign, wise spirit preventing him from making a fool of himself, from ruining a friendship, repeatedly directing him away from the mistakes he may be making.

  Farewell, he finds himself saying, a fond farewell, though he knows he’ll see her tomorrow and he thinks perhaps he is instead addressing some separate departing element of himself as he strolls back across the empty car park, the Circuit and all its phantasmagorical derangement of time, place, persona pulsing at his back.

  He leans over the potatoes he is making, very simple but he knows the texture in conjunction with the exactly right quantities of fresh butter, pepper and sea salt on top will enhance the flavour. He glances back and lets his eyes linger for a moment as she in turn sits gazing out into the night, slightly side on, hands clasping a mug of tea he has given her, wisps and strands of sound floating past, a long warbled glissando caught on a gust of wind rearing up over the fence and burrowing down into the earth at her feet.

  A distant sadness creeps over him, he had imagined that here alone with the beauty of the night and the music, they might romance, but he knows he couldn’t possibly have tried to seduce her no matter how willing she might be, isolated out here like this it would be unethical. If she had been prepared to wear an A-monitor or add a plet to the ROD that allowed him to read her interest and… but really he finds he doesn’t mind, somehow, he tells himself it doesn’t matter, she will be here for a few weeks and then go back, he will stay in contact with her, they may visit each other frequently, she may well have kissed Dominic but well, so what, as the Americans say.

  He smiles as he spoons out the potatoes onto the tray, almost laughs at himself. What does it matter, she is certainly beautiful and highly intelligent and charming, but what does it matter if she doesn’t find him to be the same? A sudden lightness, a sudden happy absence as he carries the plate out into the night, she has sensed perhaps some shift in his attitude toward her before he has even noticed it himself, looks relaxed. He sits in a creaky wicker chair, explains where the music is coming from, experiences a certain fondness and loss. Radiant night. Life as a softy yielding displacement, the universe agape, Universal Agape.

  He recites a poem or two to her as he watches headlights rise up the winding road toward them, sees someone out in the fields beyond the cabin stand, then another figure, but he feels no sense of alarm, just a moment’s sublime resignation.

  The car pulls up, the passengers emerge.

  You are under arrest, the woman says.

  Barrow

  The patch revives him, the automatic tea maker in the dashboard already has a cup of Earl Grey waiting, the steam rising questioningly. The seat lifts him up into a sitting position so that he sees through the fogged windows that the car has pulled into a layby somewhere on a minor road. A little groggily he opens the door and steps out, stretches, where is this, needs to pass water and goes around to the other side of the car, glances back in through the window and sees the last instruction on the car’s screen was to take him to where Vernon Crane was found wandering. Has he been talking in his sleep? He forgot that the cars were defaulted to voice activation. Well, he pivots slowly, looks around. A waterlogged quarry across on the other side of the road, a bare tree in the middle of a flat patch of churned up earth, a few feet further up the road a gate and then beyond it a cottage that looks to have been abandoned some time ago. Does he recognize this place? Possibly he has seen it before, but in what context? He takes his camera out of the car, photographs it, sets the ROD to search through all available records in the SSF database and comes up with two locked files available only to SSF1. Intriguing, but, Barrow, germane? Distinguish, Barrow, between what’s interesting, what seems revealing, what may lead you off on in fruitless directions. The task at hand. The investigation, Goodridge.

  He still has time to get to Castleford, which is only an hour or so away.

  The centre of the town is quiet still, early morning sun angling, fretted shadow, sky a chalky pastel blue. There are a few of the older citizens going about the tending of the public allotments and grow boxes on the central roundabout, who turn in surprise at a private motor vehicle coming in and winding slowly around them. They know it must signify some kind of official business, and even though they are many years past the point when they were likely to be bundled into vans, spirited away, taken to headquarters and detention centres even in broad daylight, a certain anxious current shivers through them as Barrow’s vehicle circles around them, dredging up old ghosts. Old disquiets.

  Goodridge’s bookshop is up a side-street filled with shops and enterprises only just beginning to open up for the day. Strange that the town has attracted so many people after the Breach, so many drawn to it, into joining the cultural and production co-operatives that have thrived here. French coming from one of the shops as he passes, what sounds like Arabic from the next that shifts into a broad Yorkshire English. Goodridge’s bookshop is still closed: Tlön Books, branches in London and Castleford, and so he pops his head around the door of the adjacent premises, says good morning, is greeted back by two women in their early twenties, asked if he would like some breakfast or a cup of tea, mint tea? Tea would be welcome, he says, and as he is handed a delicate cup poured from a rather ornate silver kettle on the hob, Goodridge goes past and opens up the shop. He blows on the tea to cool it, drinks it down in a few sweet gulps. Returns it with a smile. Well, he says, thank you.

  Goodridge? he calls out as he threads between the disordered heaps of books in mounds and the regimented shelves, finds him sitting in an alcove with his kettle boiling. Tea?

  Barrow demurs with a shake of his head and takes a seat, produces his ROD. I am here in an official capacity, he says.

  Yes, that I understand. Official, yes. Am I in trouble? Have we met before? You look familiar to me, Goodridge says.

  Perhaps Rose has mentioned me?

  Ah, Rose, how is she? She likes to play dangerous games, I myself do not.

  Barrow smooths out his trousers. I just have some questions. About Crane.

  Rose

  Rose always claimed that the Harrowing of the South, and specifically the sacking of London, had not gone far enough. She took immense pleasure still in cutting up through Stanbridge Park next to the Central Interchange, walking down what had been the Mall, and then stopping for a while to savour the blocks of flats that had been built on either side, the vast, suspended concrete cubes and rhomboids, the spiralling stairwells and overflowing greenery. A group of tourists, over for the Games no doubt, were being given a tour and she stopped to listen to the guide explain the fountains and the irrigation system that kept the water cycling and purifying, the vast tanks on the roofs and the work of gravity, a brilliant zero-power system modelled on the Alhambra’s intricate, medieval ducts and channels that Burak had made integral to the design.

  There was washing strung between many of the flats, bright as bunting, shifting in the slight breeze, and at the end of the road the great ruin where the Palace had been. It had been over twenty years now and still the debate about what to do with the land went on. It had been a community centre for a while, then a vast drinking den and nightclub called the Palace, put to any use that would scandalize and demean the expats fulminating in their enclaves in America, Singapore, Australia. A fire took the west wing and it was abandoned. So much of London had been raised and altered, so many of the old ancestral homes levelled, especially in the North and Scotland, monuments to vanity and injustice ploughed back into the communal ground, but many others still stood, sites of powe
r, something foreboding about them. Did they really still lack the courage to act on these half-dead husks when the lives that occupied them had been so comprehensively banished?

  And yet the problem remained. “The Problem of London: De-Monumentalization and the Twofold De-Memorialization” was the great essay the Clarion had printed on this subject. De-memorialization, yes, the twofold reflection on that term, there was a kind of cloudy forgetting of the past and yet the monuments remained; the monuments were destroyed, yet their memory somehow lingered. Need we keep them as a reminder of what had been?

  Perhaps the Last Generation would complete the work they had begun.

  Barrow

  Crane! Goodridge says, a name to conjure with. An evocative name. An evocation indeed. A name not heard in many moons. Have you done your yarn work, Mr Barrow, and somehow it has led you to me? Yarn work, he savours the phrase. I always liked that expression, capturing as it does the sense also of a story, a fiction, an exciting, slightly fantastical tale. Yes, investigation and invention intertwined.

  Barrow sips his tea. Goodridge clearly hasn’t had anyone to talk to for a while and he weighs up whether it will be more productive to be curt, direct, or to let him talk, slip, expose things.

  Well, well. Crane. Is he a security concern? It’s hard to identify what may be causing the tremor in his voice, anxiety, excitement?

  I am more interested in how his work may be influencing people, if it is.

  Ah, the young. Yes, he says. This revival of interest. My own work on Crane, dormant for a near quarter of a century, has been granted a new lease of life. Gratifyingly. I would say that for some Crane has become, he looks around for the word, finds it with a satisfied smile, totemic.