Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  A voyeur’s delight awaited her: confined to quarters for what he assumed would be a lengthy siege, Archie Kerrigan had made himself at home by cranking up the thermostat to Arkansas temperatures and stripping down to his T-shirt (white sleeveless) and boxers (striped, in the colors of the British Confederacy). It was in this state of half-undress that he answered the knock at his window. He did not seem surprised to find a woman perched on his sill; he threw up the sash and invited Joan in for tea. “Hope you don’t mind a little sweat,” he said, as he flipped the thermostat up another notch. Joan didn’t mind; given her penchant for philosophically untenable romances, what happened next was only too predictable, though it wasn’t until her second visit that they actually slept together.

  Afterwards, Joan groped around the bedside table for an ashtray and found a paperback instead. The book was Atlas Shrugged.

  “Is this any good?” Joan asked, while Archie got her an empty Coors can for her ashes.

  “It’s a fair yarn,” Archie replied. “Best thing to recommend it, it upsets nearly every segment of the political spectrum. I’ve seen people who handle H. L. Mencken just fine go ballistic over Ayn Rand. You can’t get much more controversial than that without naked pictures.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Well, you tell me. Read it yourself and find out.”

  “Can I at least have a hint in advance?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s over a thousand pages long, with very small type. We’re talking about a major commitment in time and effort.”

  Archie smirked. “My King James Bible is a thousand pages long, Joan. In brokedown English, no less. Would you trust another person to tell you what that book is about?”

  “I’m Catholic,” Joan reminded him.

  “Well,” said Archie, “don’t be. You’ll never save the world relying on secondary sources.” He thumped the cover of the paperback with his index finger. “Dig in.”

  And so, goaded by love’s tender arrow, she opened Rand’s book to page one and began to read.

  Atlas Shrugged was a novel of the future. Not the future as it had actually come to pass, but the future as it existed in the 1940s, in the back room of the ranch house in California where Ayn Rand wrote the first of many, many words. An altogether different future . . .

  The human race teetered on the brink of Apocalypse. Altruism—the belief that the needs of society outweighed the rights of the individual—had swept the globe, reducing every nation but one to a state of dictatorship. Alone in a world of people’s republics, the United States still shone the beacon of freedom and individual achievement; yet even in America the collectivists were rapidly taking over.

  The collectivists, the devils of the great morality play about to unfold, were chiefly notable for the goofy names their families had cursed them with: Wesley Mouch, Balph Eubank, Claude Slagenhop, Orren Boyle, Tinky Holloway, Bertram Scudder. They were physically loathsome, either bloated or stick-thin, balding, slovenly, plagued by bad skin and bad breath. They likewise possessed very little in the way of intellect; though many of them had attended college, they had learned nothing there except that there was nothing of value they cared to learn. They took useless or parasitic jobs, “working” as government bureaucrats, political lobbyists, tax collectors, commercial regulators, state-subsidized scientists and bean counters, Platonic philosophers, socialist economists, modern artists, satirists, scandal-mongering newspaper reporters, ecologists, astrologists, career welfare mothers, etc., etc. Lacking any creative talent of their own, too morally bankrupt to experience genuine happiness, the collectivists sought to punish all sign of skill or fulfillment in others; hence their devotion to an altruist ethic that championed mediocrity over ability and self-sacrifice over self-esteem. They also threw really awful dinner parties that no one even pretended to enjoy.

  Arrayed against these monsters, in the white-hat corner, were the rational individualists, the “men of the mind”: Hank Rearden, owner of the finest steel mills in the country and inventor of Rearden Metal, a revolutionary new alloy; Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d’Anconia, flamboyant heir to the d’Anconia copper-mining dynasty; Dagny Taggart, the ravishingly beautiful operating vice president of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad; self-made oil magnate Ellis Wyatt; super-banker Midas Mulligan; pro-business jurist Judge Narragansett; and a score or so of others, all easily recognizable by their heroic names, their chiseled features, and their athletically perfect physiques. Where the collectivists were good for nothing, the individualists were good—magnificent—at everything they set their minds to. Most owned their own companies, having bootstrapped themselves up from zero without any assistance or special favors from anyone; even those whose fathers had also been captains of industry did not receive any breaks but were made to earn every penny they inherited. The goods and services they brought to market were the best that they knew how to make—best meaning best quality, safest, most pleasing to the senses and the intellect, and offering the highest ratio of true value per dollar. The individualists did not produce such fine things out of any misguided altruistic devotion to “the needs of society”. Just the opposite: they were supremely selfish people, and they knew that to succeed in a rational marketplace—one in which their competitors would show no mercy and their customers no indulgence—they had no choice but to excel. Beyond that they would charge the highest price and pay the lowest wage they possibly could, both sums to be fairly determined, of course, by the even-handed logic of the market. As proponents of total laissez-faire capitalism, they refused all government aid and renounced physical violence as a tool of commerce—and they never, ever lied.

  Unfortunately, this same purity of character left the individualists vulnerable to the collectivists. Reason being second nature to them, they were naive to the workings of irrational minds, and their self-confidence blinded them to the danger such minds posed. When their best efforts were met with scorn and indifference, when their productive self-interest was condemned as “wanton greed,” when they were taxed, regulated, and robbed blind by a government “acting on behalf of the public welfare” . . . they did nothing. Though pained and puzzled by an injustice whose roots they could not fathom, they kept right on working, accepting every unfair burden heaped upon them, every artificial obstacle thrown up to impede their progress.

  Some few rebelled. A blond, blue-eyed rational philosopher named Ragnar Danneskjöld packed up his copy of Aristotle’s Organon and took to the high seas to become a privateer; he criss-crossed the Atlantic in a stateof-the-art pirate vessel, hunting down welfare ships en route to the people’s republics of Europe and Africa. Ellis Wyatt responded to an “altruistic” industrial sales tax by torching his oil wells and disappearing. Copper king Francisco d’Anconia pretended to collaborate with the collectivist leaders, then entrapped them in a fraudulent mining scheme that wiped out their stolen fortunes.

  But the greatest champion of individualism was a mystery man named John Galt. While working as an engineer for the now-defunct Twentieth Century Motor Company, Galt had invented the self-generator, a technological Holy Grail that drew static electricity from thin air and converted it into useable energy, providing a virtually limitless supply of clean motive power: a perpetual motion machine. But Galt refused to sell his invention to tyrants at any price, and he certainly wasn’t going to let them have it for free; when the heads of Twentieth Century Motors put forward a plan to collectivize the company, he junked the self-generator and stormed out, vowing to “stop the motor of the world.”

  John Galt had seen the truth: the individualists, like the Greek titan Atlas, carried the world on their shoulders, a world grown heavy with corruption and the fatal illogic of the altruist ethic. The men of the mind were wrong if they thought they could lighten the load simply by straining harder. At best they could stave off the collapse of civilization for another generation or two, in the process allowing themselves to be crushed by the weight of an ungrateful gl
obe. But that was not the answer. What Atlas must do, Galt realized, was shrug. The individualists must go on strike against their oppressors: close up their mines and factories, damp their furnaces and smokestacks, and walk away—to Atlantis, a hidden valley in the most remote corner of the Rocky Mountains, a Utopian enclave beyond the reach of the government. When the light of their creative ability had been completely withdrawn from the world at large, and the collectivists were left to gnash their teeth in the outer darkness, then one and all would finally understand “who depends on whom, who supports whom, who is the source of wealth, who makes whose livelihood possible and what happens to whom when who walks out.”

  The universe presented in Atlas Shrugged was a black-and-white, no-nonsense universe, ultimately benevolent to those who learned its rules but unforgiving to anyone who sought to evade or compromise reality. Every question had a single correct, objective answer, which reason could discover, and which, once revealed, would be embraced as true by all rational people, whether the question involved science, economics, or a more personal field of inquiry. To the men of the mind, even matters of the heart unfolded along lines of the purest logic. When Dagny Taggart met Hank Rearden, for instance, it was a given that they would become lovers, since in the strict hierarchy of rational thinkers, Dagny was the most perfect female embodiment of reasoned principle, and Hank, for the first two-thirds of Atlas Shrugged, was reason’s most perfect man. Then on page six hundred and fifty-two, having crash-landed her airplane in Atlantis, Dagny Taggart finally came face to face with John Galt, the most rational human being on earth—a veritable pope of reason, stern and infallible. Dagny, of course, pledged eternal love to Galt, and Gait to her; Hank Rearden’s status was changed in a twinkling to that of beloved friend. This did not make Hank jealous. Jealousy was a collectivist emotion, an irrational yearning for an undeserved object of value, and Hank Rearden was neither collectivist nor irrational; therefore, Q.E.D., he not only didn’t feel jealous, he couldn’t feel jealous. On the contrary, he admired the more fitting symmetry of the new union in the same way he would have admired the clean architectural lines of a well-built skyscraper. He saw the logic behind Dagny’s pairing with Gait and shed no tears at his own loss.

  By page nine hundred and twenty-seven, all of the individualists but one had defected to Atlantis. The sole hold-out was Dagny Taggart, who despite her love for John Gait still refused to abandon her railroads. Brush-fires of anarchy and chaos broke out across America as the collapse of the altruist empire drew nigh, yet Dagny continued to believe that the final crash could be averted. Surely even the villains must in the end see reason, surely at the last moment they would throw up their arms and say: “Enough is enough. You were absolutely right, we were completely wrong. No need to bring the roof down on our heads.”

  But such a surrender would have been a rational act, and collectivists did not act rationally. Even after John Gait took to the nation’s airwaves with a fifty-eight-page speech that laid out the irrefutable logic underlying the strike, they still wouldn’t give up. Instead, the collectivists had their spies follow Dagny Taggart to a lovers’ rendezvous and arrested Gait. They did not execute him; they recognized that he was smarter than they were and tried to force him to compromise his values and become their economic czar. When he refused, he was hauled off to the State Science Institute to be broken on the rack of Dr. Floyd Ferris’s electronic Persuader machine. Gait’s defiance during the torture session that followed was so heroic that James Taggart (Dagny’s evil, altruist brother) suffered a crippling existential crisis and lapsed into coma.

  While James was carted away to a nice quiet room somewhere, Dagny led the rest of the individualists on a nonaltruistic rescue raid. The thugs guarding the Science Institute were so deficient in reasoning skills that they couldn’t decide whether or not to defend themselves and hence were easily overcome. Gait was liberated; a private plane fleet bore the entire company of heroes away to Atlantis for a victory breakfast. Looking down as they flew over New York, they saw the great city’s lights extinguished, final signal of the collectivists’ defeat. The motor of the world had been stopped; after a season of rest, the men of the mind would return from exile and rebuild civilization in accordance with their just and true principles. The end.

  “Jesus,” Joan said, as John Gait gave the novel’s closing benediction and traced a dollar sign in space above the desolate earth. She laughed, and shut the book, and spent a moment studying the portrait on the back cover. “Who is this woman?”

  “Well?” said Archie. “How was it?”

  Two months had passed. The Sensitivity in Debate Ordinance had been repealed over Christmas break, and an anonymous admirer had mailed Archie a real Rebel flag, autographed by Charlton Heston, which he’d hung as a canopy over his bed. Joan stretched out beneath it, peering up at the blue St. Andrew’s cross. She lit a cigarette.

  “Pinch me if I missed a punchline somewhere,” Joan said, “but this book is not intended as a spoof, correct? It’s not an incredibly understated parody?”

  Archie shook his head. “Rand’s an ex-Russki, pre-glasnost, and they don’t kid much. They’re not much into understatement, either. . . . When she says ‘And I mean it’ in the afterword, you can bet money she means it.”

  “Jesus . . . so it really is, then . . .”

  “Really is what?”

  “The anti-Communist Manifesto,” Joan said. “Das Kapital for capitalists, with chase scenes and heavy petting . . .”

  “Hmm,” said Archie. “Well I suppose you could describe it that way. Although Rand doesn’t preach violence or class warfare, and she’s got nothing in particular against the proletariat—”

  “—so long as they know their place, sure,” Joan said. Again she laughed. “Man. Penny Dellaporta would shit if she read this.” And so would a lot of conservatives Joan knew. Rand’s rational capitalists were godless capitalists, of course, as scornful of religion, knee-jerk patriotism, and traditional family values as they were of labor unions and government charity.

  “But what do you think of the book, Joan?” Archie asked.

  “Me? What do you think I think? I think Rand’s a total loon—but a fun loon.” Joan took another look at the portrait on the back cover of Atlas. “She’s not still alive, is she? I’d love to hear her speak . . . or better yet, have a nice long argument with her.”

  “I might pay to see that debate myself,” Archie said, recognizing the gleam in Joan’s eye. “But you missed her. She died in ’82, same year you were born.”

  “Lung cancer?” Joan guessed. Tobacco farming had been one of Atlantis’s first and most important industries.

  “She’d had surgery for lung cancer, but I think it was her heart that finally did for her.”

  “And how old was she?”

  “Seventy-seven, seventy-eight, somewhere around there.”

  “So if she was seventy-seven in ’82, that would mean . . .”

  “1905,” Archie said. “She was born in St. Petersburg. Her real name was Alice Rosenbaum, and her dad, Fronz, owned a drugstore that got nationalized by the Bolsheviks in ’17. Family ducked and covered in the Crimea for a few years, crossing their fingers that the White Russians would roll back the revolution, but no such luck. Eventually they went back to St. Pete’s and moved into a cubbyhole flat in an apartment building they’d used to own. No running water, no electricity, and they had to bribe some party comrades for the privilege of living there.”

  “How did they escape to America?”

  “They didn’t,” Archie said. “Rand’s the only one who got out. The Soviets relaxed foreign travel restrictions for a while in the mid-1920s; she managed to get a passport and permission to visit some long-lost relatives in Chicago. Packed her bags, said goodbye to her folks, and lit out for the States.”

  “And never came back.”

  “Right.”

  “Did she ever see her family again?”

  “One sister, almost fifty years late
r. Her parents and her other sister died in the siege of Leningrad in World War II.”

  “Huh.”

  “As for Rand, she’d decided when she was nine years old that she wanted to make her living as a writer. One of her Chicago uncles owned a movie house, so she spent her first few months stateside watching silent films, picking up English from the dialogue titles, and when she thought she had it down well enough to compose story outlines, she moved on to California to try to break into screenwriting.”

  “Just like that?” Joan said. “A few months off the boat, and she—”

  “Hey,” said Archie, “it worked. Her second day in Hollywood Cecil B. DeMille saw her walking by the side of the road at DeMille Studio, and offered to show her around the set of his latest movie, a Bible picture called The King of Kings. When he found out she needed work, he hired her as an extra, and later, after King of Kings wrapped, as an assistant script developer.”

  “Rand was an extra in a Bible picture?” Joan laughed. “Playing what sort of part?”

  “Roman aristocrat, I think. Bystander to the Crucifixion.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Yeah. She met her husband on the Via Dolorosa, as a matter of fact. She’d flirted with the actor who played Judas, but then she saw this bit player in a Roman scarf and toga named Frank O’Connor and fell in love at first sight. During the filming of Christ’s death march she stuck out a foot and tripped him—O’Connor, not Christ—and they started talking, and by the end of the day she’d decided she was going to marry him, which eventually she did. And that’s also how she became a U.S. citizen.”