Gain

by Richard Powers

  Government also struck at the company with the first significant tariff reductions since Resolve Clare’s death. The United States, now the home of two fifths of the world’s manufacturing, suddenly absorbed a tidal wave of cheap imports. The time had come to see just how good for business natural selection really was.

  In the end, Clare kept its share and competed, by making sure that nothing went to waste. Its chemists learned how to make the same old things out of cheaper and surprising materials. They studied Carver’s ingenious uses for peanut oils and cotton sluff. They began to convert refuse materials, turning the expense of disposal to a little bonus profit.

  Clare thrived in the Progressive Era. Its products liberated women from drudgery and elevated the general level of health and cleanliness even among the poor. And its factories and reclamation businesses provided a model for the proper conduct of commercial exertions. When Teddy Roosevelt said he wanted to apply the principles of good business to the new endeavor of public conservation, he had the Clare model in the back of his mind.

  The mountains had been cut for easy passage and the valleys raised up for richer cultivation. Summers ran chilled for longer shelf life, and winters warmed to extend the season of useful work. Light bulbs lengthened the intervals of productive day, allowing still more timesaving tasks to be completed in less time. Soon death itself would be brought into the process, made to occur at the optimal transfer points.

  “THINK,” read the new letterhead over at National Cash Register. Douglas ordered that the Clare letterhead imitate the slogan. “Manage wisely, and wisdom will manage.” Not as succinct, but it made its point. That desperate readiness for new solutions, even at the eleventh hour.

  Everywhere, the corporation proved to be the greatest extension of human prowess since the spear and the most flexible one since the baseball mitt. Ever-larger institutions began to spring from the corporation’s brow, giving birth to one another: the Federal Reserve System. The Consumer Price Index. The first national income tax.

  Each new human structure launched more inventions than raw meat launches maggots. Ten years into the century’s experiment, and entrepreneurs everywhere were breeding radio, motion pictures, the box camera, the mass-production automobile plant, telegraphic transmission of pictures, the mass-market phonograph, cellophane. Edison even promised a machine that would communicate with the dead. An infant industry sprang up to meet every imaginable human desire, and several arose to meet desires that were not yet human. Clare could not spend its way forward fast enough. There were too many sure bets to invest in.

  Even the humble store reinvented itself. After a test run with Filene’s on Washington Street in mother Boston, Clare jumped wholesale into the new block-long, ten-story beehive monstrosities, with excellent results. Shortly after, it put its stamp of approval upon mail order. Of the third of a billion packages the U.S. Parcel Post shipped in its maiden year, 12,396 originated at Clare. Between Sears, Spiegel, and Montgomery Ward, universal availability came to visit every flyspeck town that ever sullied the map. What’s more, catalogs taught the public the invaluable lesson of how to buy goods blind.

  American-built, gasoline-motored, heavier-than-air vehicles lifted off the surface of the earth. The last real barriers to the universal shipping of goods collapsed everywhere. And now that America had its own nursling empire, Clare raised its eyes from trade’s old borders. Fats from the Chicago slaughterhouses joined coconut oil from the American Philippines and palm oil from the Belgian Congo in the same kettle. Why couldn’t the company emulate its own products?

  The firm stood ready before its next stage of existence. It would take its magnificent mills of wealth and export them, process for process, into new climates. Start the whole seed again, from scratch.

  The choice for Clare’s ambassador for international start-up operations quite literally made itself. Young Douglas Clare II had taken a First in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. He’d returned to the States to work in three different company plants, first as lineman, then as foreman, then as plant manager. Even after he rose to direct the Materials and Purchasing Department, he never lost his taste for travel, art, architecture, or his beloved far side of the Atlantic.

  After five minutes in any cathedral from Ulm to York, he could recite the details of the nave’s elevation and bays blindfold. He could recount the lancets and mullions of the tiniest parish church in photographic detail. He bought Cézannes when the man was still considered a boorish laughingstock. He took the waters at Spa and Baden-Baden, speaking to most anyone he met in whatever language they addressed him. It was as if the man’s entire vita had been groomed in advance, for the very opportunity the company now threw him. And in fact, it had.

  Douglas the Elder packed his most successful son off to Europe with detailed instructions for investigating rights, privileges, and potentials in Britain, France, Germany, and the Low Countries. The plan was to use Snowdrop Soap to run advance interference, a kind of flying wedge. Then they’d get the other products downfield by using America’s newly invented forward pass.

  Douglas II stepped off the boat in Le Havre in the first week of April 1914. In four months, the business partners he courted began to slaughter one another. In three years, the unthinkable went inevitable: Doug Jr.’s compatriots died by the tens of thousands, to salvage the same international system of loans that was supposed to have rendered war obsolete.

  At the end of the four-year, static, stately bloodletting, ten million lay dead, four empires had vanished, a quarter of the world began to renounce the market system, and Clare had chosen a short list of plant sites on the Continent and in Britain.

  Reluctantly, she refinances the house. She knows it means paying for the present by mortgaging the future. But at least it’s paying for the present. Cash in hand, first things first. She’ll figure out how to make payments down the road, after she figures out what’s down the road.

  Lindsey, at work, pulls some bank strings for her. He seems almost eager to. As if money’s cheap, after what he’s done to her. And she’d rather take the favor from him than from Don, because the bastard owes her.

  Each day she gets a little strength back, now that the atomic devastation lets up. Her body, not knowing any better, rallies. She’s like a tiny science-fair seed planted upside down, spinning, righting itself by the laws built into growing things.

  One day, she wakes up wanting a scrambled egg. The next morning, while the kids are at school, before the visiting nurse comes by, she tries the stairs. A third of the way up, she crumples. She has to rest twice, but at last makes it to the top. The second floor of her house is like another country. She has forgotten even the color of the walls.

  Her mind clears a little. She starts generating small surpluses of thought again. A false spring of February’s doing, flushing the ice pack into puddles. Don’t you want to know? Don’s words nag her more, the better she feels. At last she hits that week when she’s lucid enough to want to. Want to know, know something, while knowing is still a going proposition.

  She tries the books that she gets from Marian. The short ones, anyway. She might need to Cliffs Note the more difficult ones. She gets to the point where she can read the word “adenocarcinomatous” without needing to call it quits for the day.

  The stuff is worse than poetry. The more she reads, the harder it gets. She reads enough to begin to suspect that the real experts want to know the same things she does. Technicians, as TV in her girlhood liked to say, are working on the problem. Each level down gets stickier, requiring ever-bigger institutions full of scientists and administrators to unfold. Every new ten-syllable Latin word requires another million more twenty-five-dollar contributions to root it up.

  After reading for several days, she still does not know what “cell type” means. And when she looks hers up, it tells her less than nothing. She’d have had to start ten years before getting sick, just to know what hit her.

  On Presidents’ Day weekend, she te
lls the kids, breezily, “Why don’t we head to the Historical Society?” They give her a bewildered look. “You know. The Riverton Mansion.”

  “Didn’t we just go there?” Tim whines. Five years ago. This from a child for whom thirteen milliseconds is an eternity.

  “Sure, Mom,” Ellen says. “I’ll drive.”

  “Let’s walk.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “I can wheel you, you know. If it’s my driving you’re worried about.”

  Laura pleads with her in silence. The mansion is not so far as it was. It gets closer, each day that the treatments recede into bad dreams. Please. She needs to walk outside again. Now. Today. Ready or not. She begs her daughter with her eyes, until Ellen relents.

  Just being outside is the greatest source of stamina she could ask for. Ellen walks alongside her, mocking her baby steps. “Go for it, Mama.”

  Tim walks five yards ahead, placating his Game Boy, pushing all the buttons it wants pushed. He does fall back when Laura gets winded. One child under each arm, while she catches her breath.

  The Riverton Mansion has grown since they last came out. Or Laura has shrunk more than she realized. Ellen starts for the stairs, takes three, then turns around, remembering.

  “Go on, honey,” Laura reassures her. “I’m fine.” Her daughter disappears up to the attic dolls and dresses, a secret regression that the crowd at school never needs to know.

  Laura tries to interest Tim in the old machines. “Look at this, honey. It’s an old mechanical corrugator. They used to . . .”

  He tries to listen. She can see him struggling. But he cannot sit still for it. He buzzes the rooms at high speed, pauses briefly at the old radio gear, then retires to the foyer, where he sits on a 1920s love seat, blasting the unbeatable twelfth-level boss on Wonky Dong.

  Laura heads for the Clare collection, the rooms she has always skipped on past visits. All the boring bric-a-brac of company history that Mr. and Mrs. Riverton collected during his thirty-six-year association with the Lacewood plant.

  Some people collect glass paperweights or telephone pole insulators. Some collect books or brocade or bad debts. Mrs. Riverton collected dolls and clothes. During the week, her husband collected subsidiaries. And on weekends, he collected every scrap of memorabilia that ever bore the name Clare.

  Rooms full of it: stationery, shipping cartons, drink trays, presidential citations. Goofy public health primers. Tape clips. Stereoscope cards of factory christenings. Bills of sale. Ancient dentifrice powder tins with embarrassing logos of beaming golliwogs that you’d think any good company man would have wanted to bury.

  Why? she wonders. To fill the house with the stuff. To build a collection so impressive that it forces your kids and grandkids to extend it, with taxpayer help. To show it off to crowds long after your death.

  The rooms fill up with display cases, each devoted to a slew of packaging and ads. Some of the slogans ring like old nursery rhymes in her ears: We make the impossible happen. Making your life a little simpler. One and the same thing, at this point. She finds herself humming all the tunes, too. Every familiar phrase, its melody.

  Each glass showcase gets a little older than the last. The Me Decade reverts to the Summer of Love, which fades back into the Golden Era. Butterflies in a box. After three or four cases, she realizes she has entered the loop backwards. But she’s in too deep to leave and start again from the beginning.

  Time pulls off, layer after layer. The company strips in front of her, like someone getting undressed for the night. Factories shrink; equipment goes rickety and primitive; the official company portraits grain and blur. The Oakland addresses on the labels vanish, turn back into Kansas City, then Lacewood, Chicago, Sandusky, Walpole, Roxbury: a reverse Pilgrim’s Progress, back toward Plymouth Rock.

  “There is Balm in Gilead,” she reads. A glass wall cabinet proclaims, “Native Balm soap with secret extract of Healing Root will cure several cutaneous and dermal disorders.” And everywhere, the scalp of a long-suffering Indian Brave, whom she vaguely knew about but never suspected.

  Soon she’s too far back for anything that might help her. But the goods are like an ambulance on the interstate: against her own will, she has to slow down and look. She wanders back into the next room, then the one beyond that. Time unthreads; profits shrink with each step. She relives the sale of the first two pounds of soap, delivered by hand, at a disastrous loss of cash and hours.

  The famous Clare logo grows backwards before her eyes. The icon unsimplifies. It branches and embellishes itself until finally, after all these years, she makes out what it is: the bud of an ornate plant.

  She’s known the thing her whole life, but never would have guessed. A lush weed, nothing that could ever take root in her garden. In fact, the thing looks like nothing that grows on earth. Tropical. Foreign. Martian.

  The plant earns one whole case of its own. She traces its discovery by the brother of the company’s founders, on some early research voyage to the South Seas. Letters in the naturalist’s spidery hand fan out, one on top of another. Below the letters, a caption announces how much Mr. Riverton paid for the papers in public auction.

  Of the visible lines, she can read only a few. How the islander King kept the living root in his healing pouch. How only this man Clare recognized the root’s odd smell. How the native name meant either strength or use. How powerful taboos prevented the plant from hurting anyone, by binding the soul of the injurer to his victim.

  This last bit curdles on her lip like alum. Just what she needs. But the letters fail to go into detail.

  What tiny roots that plant once had. How was anyone to know? She pushes on, article after article, slogan after slogan. She reads all the lore, how much the sale of those first two pounds of soap lost them. She studies the simple formula: a pound of fat makes two pounds of soap, one of which will trade for the next pound of fat. A simple enough thing, and nothing can keep it from covering the earth.

  She ventures back through the audit trail until she reaches the docks of Boston, desiccated. She washes up exhausted in front of a cardboard calling card that reads, “He that hath clean hands shall grow stronger and stronger.”

  What else did anyone ever want? Here it is, the thin thing pulling life on, the value-added thread tying salve to salvation. She sits down in a refinished chair in the corner. She closes her eyes, wiped out. She pictures a crippling class action suit, the next microscopic bit of corporate history laid out in a last, empty display. A settlement big enough to close down the whole, ancient operation.

  She has a month to join this procession. A month to decide where to sign. But it will take her longer than that, will take a whole, eternal afternoon just to walk back home.

  “Thank you, guys,” she tells the kids, halfway to the finish line.

  Tim shrugs. “For what?” Ellen asks, almost snapping.

  “For doing this. For bringing me.”

  “Jesus, Mom. Don’t make us ralph.”

  Laura calls Marian as soon as they get home. She still has fifteen minutes before the library closes. “Can you tell me where a certain line came from? It sounds like a quote or something.”

  “I can try, Mrs. Bodey. How does it go?”

  “He that hath clean hands shall grow stronger and stronger.”

  The librarian pulls up and scans the electronic full text of four thousand famous books at once. “Got it,” she replies, half a minute later. “It’s from the Book of Job. Chapter seventeen. Verse nine.”

  WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

  A wide-angle pan along the decimated horizon. A sober female, public-television-voiced narrator intones:

  The town of Muinak, in the former Soviet Union.

  Not that long ago, Muinak was a thriving inland port on the coast of the Aral Sea. Now it sits in the midst of a vast salt desert.

  Aralsk. A different town, the same fate. Its people once fished for a living. Now they don’t know how they will continue to put
food on the table.

  How did this happen? And why? It happened because people in other towns in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan needed to eat just as badly as the people of Muinak and Aralsk. To grow their crops, they diverted the Syrdarja and Amudarja, the great rivers feeding the Aral. Yields soared. Water fell. Now the entire region is stretched to the breaking point.

  Intercut black-and-white footage of varying stock quality rolls by to a Berio sound track.

  In Japan, forty-four nuclear reactors sit on the unstable boundaries of tectonic plates. In northern Europe, crucial fisheries collapse from overuse. In China, a rapid growth in the standard of living is about to flood the world with greenhouse gases and CFCs. In the United States, fat-soluble PCBs concentrate more densely on each rung up the food chain. In India, industrial pollution is already the leading cause of hospitalized illness. Throughout Africa, AIDS, famine, and runaway birthrates have become a way of life.

  The images culminate in a robed mother and child, sitting quietly in a dusty doorway. Berio has slowed to Brahms: andante, piano and strings.

  There is a time for every purpose under heaven.

  Right now, it’s time for the best that the human race can do. Right now, it’s time to think.

  The Advanced Research Group

  CLARE MATERIAL SOLUTIONS

  War wrought more changes at home than it did in Europe’s trenches. The new reality of total warfare maimed the Progressives and machine-gunned the last holdout opposition to big business. All talk of closing down the monopolies ceased well before Armistice Day, and it never started up again after the signing.

  For the war not only proved the impossibility of beating the giant corporations. It showed how much the public good now depended upon them. The electrified, biplaned, broadcast, synthetic, pharmaceuticaled, plasticized human project could no longer last a week without those vast, syndicated pools of capital.