“You need to be careful. Someone is playing tricks,” Sarah said in a tone of friendly concern. “Maybe the world of science fiction has taken over our minds.”
Then I did something stupid. I stood up and moved toward Sarah as if some magnetic attraction had taken hold of me. I tried to resist. I stopped at the bookcases and pretended to inspect my videotape collection. I pulled one tape and tried to read the title, but instead stared at it blankly. The power became stronger, and I found myself drifting toward the light that enshrined Sarah. Like some puppet on a string, I plopped down next to her on our nice brocade sofa. She was startled. So was I.
“I see Mohammed has come to the mountain.” Sarah›s wit was improving by the minute.
“I just thought that this was easier than shouting across the room.”
“You don’t have any ulterior motives?” Sarah asked with a thin smile.
“Me? I thought I was the inert king of the easy chair. I am just an impotent species addicted to my sterile addictions.”
“Oh, but you are so much more,” Sarah hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice.
I was starting to get creeped out by Sarah’s change of attitude. She never had any ambition to do anything. Once she discovered her inability to have children, she crept further in the dismal direction of avoiding risks, people, and confrontations. All too often, I had seen her saddled with profound sadness. Life for her had become a boring routine without bearings or desires. By all reasonable standards, most days she was deader than a zombie, which was of course redundant, but to her life appeared redundant. But right now she perked with the caffeine of animated life.
“We need to do this more,” I said as I reached for her hand and caressed it.
“What are you doing?”
I decided to ignore the question. Anyone could see what I was doing. Finally, she admitted that she enjoyed our little informal talk.
“You’re good at small talk,” Sarah said. “I think I will hire you.”
That was it. I began to suspect that she was on heavy drugs or that she was someone other than my wife. Two witty sarcastic remarks in one evening were just too coincidental.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Have I done something wrong?”
I started to ask her little things that nobody else could ever know, like the time we traveled to Fresno and ran into a taxi cab driver who knew a friend of ours in Hemet. Then there was the time we found ourselves hopelessly lost in the Mojave Desert on an unmarked dirt road. She had wanted to see a remote desert tortoise reserve, which turned out to be nothing more than a small sign and a few rabbit burrows. She remembered all of that. Of course, a clever alien replica of Sarah would know all of that too. Had some extraterrestrial body snatchers taken her over?
Oddly, she found my little drive down memory lane intoxicating. She put her thin arm around my neck and started to kiss me on the lips. I responded in kind. I could not believe that she had initiated physical contact on her own volition. She started to lick my lips with her tongue, teasing them. It was exciting and shocking. This proved what I suspected; she had been taken over by aliens. But I was not going to protest.
Chapter 6
I was amazed that only a handful of citizens had voiced their displeasure with Hemet’s new program to increase driving efficiency. The scanty few who did protest were an aging gang of tightwads who begrudged any government expansion whatsoever. We christened these rigorous bean counters “The Usual Suspects.”
I had numerous encounters with this motley crew. They would regularly invade city council meetings and yap about our wasteful habits and restrictive zoning codes. Nothing could ever appease them. They envisioned themselves as the spitting image of the late U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen, who had the audacity to question the cost of the eternal flame over President Kennedy’s grave. Like Dirksen, these aging relics of bygone days were so frugal that they would risk back surgery to pick up an abandoned penny.
I knew most of the malcontents by name. Bert Wallace was their ringleader. He seemed to be everywhere, attending every civic meeting that had ever been held in the history of mankind. If any meeting were open to the public, Bert would be there, even if it was scheduled for midnight. It made me wonder if he had anything resembling a real life.
There were many occasions where I watched Bert and his crew of anti-tax cadre overwhelm city council meetings. They would sit up front in their checkered short-sleeved shirts and wave copies of the U.S. Constitution as if that little book had any effect on corruption or misconduct. Many considered Bert as Hemet’s equivalent of Howard Jarvis in a quixotic quest to cut spending and red tape. Luckily, his shiny armor had started to rust. He had suffered a stroke and found it necessary to navigate life on new terms. I guess it was too difficult to round up and corral agitated taxpayers from a wheelchair.
I can still remember engaging these zealots in the hallways after city council meetings last year. My approach was to be brutally honest. I explained that it did not matter if our city kept overspending tax revenues. That was just a minor problem for the politically adept. That was because the city leaders would shake down citizens by using scare tactics. In fact, it seemed the more we scared the populace, the more money they would toss into our city coffers. When I would get a little cocky, I would taunt these penny-pinching relics. I would openly declare that the city could spend like a drunken sailor because the public was almost eager to pay the overpriced tab, no matter the price.
When I mouthed these words after the city council meeting, Bert and his cynical rabble-rousers became unglued. At the time, they were pushing hard to get the city council to slash city spending. They were having little success. I approached Bert and tried to reason with him. “Come on, our city just needs a little more funding to operate efficiently. Just a wee bit more. Besides, you have little power to stop them.”
Bert cleared his throat. “You can give every dime you own to the tax goons, but it won’t be enough. It will never be enough.”
“Well,” I backed away. “But we’re in such desperate need of funds.”
“So, taxpayers aren’t?”
“Come on, they’re not that poor.”
“That’s a crock of manure!”
“Oh,” I folded my arms, “Then how come we’re running a big deficit?”
Bert stood there with a crooked grin spread across his face. “Okay, how about this? Why can’t our city fathers simply spend money more carefully. This is really a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”
There was no use talking to a headstrong tightwad. Everybody knew that Bert was an unreasonable man who persisted in trying to change the world one tax cut at a time. That was never going to happen.
Bert shook his head and departed. That did not stop the churlish mob. One got into my face. She was a skinny woman with menacing glare. She had taken an offense to my assertion that politicians could easily play the public like a fiddle. In her mind, such political shenanigans were impossible under a democracy. I was sanguine.
“Oh,” I quickly responded. “You would think that would be the case, but you’re wrong.”
I then preceded to describe what city leaders needed to do to trick the citizenry to open up their fat wallets. City officials only had to conjure up a full-blown crisis, create a sense of urgency, and then publicize the horrible and dire consequences of the city going bankrupt. To get their message across, they would run advertisements warning that people would die if voters failed to pass another big tax increase. They would make thinly-veiled threats that without more revenues, the city would be forced to impose deep cuts to public services. These cuts always focused on defunding police, fire departments, public hospitals or popular parks. Such claims held little truth. Truth and politics are rarely synonymous. But the citizenry were weak-minded and made of mostly spineless sheep, gullible, and easy to manipulate.
You could have heard a pin drop. I enjoyed watching their faces fall into ridges of despair
after I finished my little sermon. I had a feeling that they really did not understand what I was trying to say. I guess it did not matter anymore. Ever since Bert’s medical problems, the mob was now leaderless and fading fast. There was no reason to worry about being frugal. The revenue floodgates were thrown wide-open, allowing taxpayers’ cash to flush down sinkholes. I was hoping that some of this generosity would trickle down my way, considering that DED would require a big cash lifeline. Lucky me.
* * * * *
Getting involved with DED was heaven-sent. I began receiving a number of generous benefits. Big Al had presented me with a spacious office, a mahogany desk, large picture windows, and fancy white blinds to shut out the world. Life was good.
The best part was that our project was very successful. It was working marvelously, except for its higher cost overruns. The public also seemed happy, or at least unaware, of the mounting costs. We had placed advertisements on city busses, newspapers, radio stations, and other media campaigns. It was working. Citizens were calling in and receiving valuable information on how to plan their driving routes. The whole concept seemed noble. People always required a lot of assistance, and it felt good lending a friendly hand to disoriented and confused drivers.
My old job as a city planner had been mostly unrewarding. It was stressful to try to pin the blame on someone or something when bad situations arise. It happened almost every time I informed residents that they could not add a new bedroom or family room due to their undersized lot. I had to deflect their anger and cite outdated building codes, instead of indifferent officials who approved them. I was not the guilty party. I was not involved in adopting such restrictive housing codes; I was just following orders. Of course, most agitated citizens never saw it that way.
It took less than a month for our new department to organize into a well-run operation. Every phone call was processed and routed to DED, where our staff took the information and calculated the most efficient route. The system worked, but the process was time-consuming, sometimes taking over ten minutes or more per call. Some callers became frustrated and aggravated and hung up on us. Other times they would call back and asked us to recalculate their driving route. We discovered that these drivers were either lost or had changed their destinations. I began to wonder if they were just fickle or were somewhat impatient for the correct answer. I knew that something was wrong, but my pay scale did not entitle me to come up with solutions. That was Big Al’s primary job. As for me, I just assumed that we were a big success.
The best part of the job was that I had little supervision. Al spent most of his time at three-hour-long martini lunches and at supposedly important private meetings. A least he came in most afternoons to keep up with the latest expanding workloads. At the end of most days, he would drag his half-liquored body into my office and quickly study the daily chart. He would rub his fat chin, hum a queer little tune, and declared that we were in line with expectations.
However, today was different. Big Al almost ran up the stairs and rushed into the office lobby. I could see him through my glass door. I checked my watch. It was still early in the morning. Something was wrong. I shook my wristwatch. No, it was still working. Someone was in trouble. Naturally, he made a beeline to my office, opened my door, and slammed it shut. Almost out of breath, he stopped in front of my desk, peered down, and displayed a funny look. It might have been the evil eye or just gas leaking from indigestion. Whatever it was, I wanted no part of it. I closed my eyes.
“Spencer,” he barked out, “I’m disappointed. Really disappointed.”
“Well…” I hesitated. “Could you be more specific? I mean, I’m good at many things, but disappointing people is not one of my strengths.”
Al leaned over my desk. “Quit fooling around. Do you know the population of Hemet?”
“Hemet?”
“What other city do we work for?”
“Right. Ah… I have the figures right here somewhere.” I went through a stack of paper and pulled out one sheet. “Yes. Here it is. I just did a study on that exact question.” I looked down and quickly scanned the page. “Here it is. The most updated version is that Hemet has almost 60,000 inhabitants in the incorporated areas and around another 14,000 in the outer unincorporated areas, mostly in East Hemet.”
“Wow, that many. That’s great detective work.” Big Al reached over and grabbed my datasheet. He took a few minutes to read its details. “The question is, how many calls are we getting daily?”
“I put the new numbers on your desk each afternoon. Haven’t you been…”
“That’s not important. What are the numbers now?”
“Okay, as recorded yesterday, the number is now averaging at least 200 calls a day.”
“That bad?”
“No, we had less than 50 calls per day a few weeks ago. That’s a big dramatic increase.”
“Not good enough!” Al roared. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
“It’s out of focus.” I shrugged.
“You’re not looking at the bigger picture, Spencer. The bigger picture.”
“Okay, it’s out of focus and not big enough.”
“Do I have to do the thinking for everybody here?”
“Well… that’s your job description.”
“Oh, yeah, well…” Al broke out in a rueful smile.
I sat there confused, trying to understand his train of thought, if there was any. I struggled to access more of my limited gray matter. That hurt. All I got was a headache. But at least I was starting to see some correlation between Hemet’s population and the number of calls coming into the DED. “Well, I suppose more people should be calling us.”
“Bingo! We should be receiving thousands of calls each day. The motorist desperately needs our help but for some reason, they are forgetting to call us. We must do more.”
I did not like the way his train of thought was heading. A sudden thought pierced my brain. We could not even handle a few hundred calls a day. Was it possible to explain this concept to a man who thought he was bigger than life? I had to find some way to bring my boss back to his terra firma senses, some surefire method to both avoid and solve the problem. I lied. “I’ll start working on it right away.”
“Fine. But I’m no fool.”
I sat there speechless. The silence was embarrassing. I was not sure what he wanted me to say. A comedy routine came to mind, but I was positive he was not searching for a humorous climax to his stupid question.
“I know what you’re thinking, Spencer.”
I truly hoped not, I shuddered in quiet thought. The DED was not my project. My pay was not nearly enough to solve unsolvable problems and come up with a brilliant and workable plan. That was why we had upper management. They get the big bucks for coming up with harebrained ideas that could bankrupt the city treasury. Then again, a failed project would likely lead to larger departmental funding. At least that is how it usually worked out for government work. I remembered an adage from an astute accountant who assured us that “government succeeded by failing.” That seemed so true. I could achieve success by failing miserably and yet fulfill our mission. They might even give an award for an outstanding work record.
“Spencer. Come on, I know you know.”
“I suppose we sort of underestimated our potential and need more staff.” I murmured in a soft and hesitant tone.
“That’s it! You’re a genius. A sheer genius. That’s the perfect solution to our problem. We must enlarge our staff and funding to better serve the public.” Big Al paused, closed his eyes, and concentrated for a moment. “But on second thought, we should do even more. We should make all call-ins mandatory.” Al bowed his head slightly to me. “You’re another Einstein.”
“Sure… I mean why wouldn’t that work like magic?” I looked away, trying to hide my shocked expression. We were starting to sound like some fascist-communist comrades from World War II. What was next—the Hemet’s police force shipped to Europe to invade Poland?
<
br /> “I like the sound of all of this,” Al raised his hand and twirled his index finger in a tight circle. “It has panache written all over it.”
“But will the people dutifully obey?” I tried to backtrack. This whole line of thinking was getting out of hand. “Doesn’t the public have a right to make their own decisions?” I smiled with a weak mixture of guilt and shame. “I think I read that somewhere in the Constitution.”
Big Al started to stroke his fat face with his stubby fingertips. “That’s right. But we have to protect the public first. It is our duty to provide health and safety support.”
“They might find our program somewhat odious. You know, they might just ignore us.”
“Not in my city. We will have to make sure every motorist gets proper authorization and a special driver’s card.”
“You mean a driver’s license?”
“Spencer, get with the program. We need a special card and ID for everyone. If we don’t, they might feel tempted to cheat. We need to make everyone use our services. Besides, the public should not have the option to drive anywhere they want. We own the roads. We can do what we want. Besides, nobody wants chaos in the streets. Nobody!”
“But we don’t have the means to enforce it.”
Big Al looked straight at me. “Boy, you’re right again, Spencer. What would I do without you?”
I sighed with a mixture of relief and elation. Finally, Big Al was coming to his senses.
“You know what this means?
I shook my head, assuming that Big Al had seen the lunacy of his ways.
“We’ll have to arrest, prosecute, and imprison lawbreaking motorists. Of course, we will require some serious muscle. People need to respect the law. We need to enlist the entire police department, maybe the whole National Guard. They can handle any bad-ass drivers.”
We Are Them Page 6