by C. P. Boyko
Matheson. “She will return, or, rather, be returned.”
Lea, looking at the page on the table. “Shouldn’t I have somehow seen this coming?”
Sid. “What contemptible, underhand treatment. From Glen and Rebecka and Tonio I’d never expect it.”
Daize. “How is it worse than what you’d meant to do to poor Lea?”
Sid. “I was only reversing what you’d done to me!”
Daize. “Don’t you remember? You quit—half a year ago!”
Matheson. “That never happened. Nobody resigned, and nobody was fired. Hell, there was no strike. If she can sell the factory, impose on us some dictatorial new director, we can then impose on her the past that we prefer—and future too. Before she’s back, let’s get our story straight.” To Daize. “Do you, for instance, work here still—again?”
Lea. “The financial statements and reports will take all weekend to compile alone. And look! He wants a list of all employees, with their past and present salaries, too.”
Matheson. “You see! We draft our own reality.”
Sid. “So this upstart can better dismantle it. Sure, he’ll sack first who he deems to be most overpaid.”
Ottavia enters, escorted by two workers.
Workers. “This one wants to talk to you, boss.” They exit, standing guard outside the door.
Matheson. “You’re ready to negotiate now terms?”
Ottavia. “You’re the hooligan responsible for this enormity? I’ll see you’re thrown in prison for this, with your hired ruffians, before the day’s end.”
Matheson. “I told you: no one leaves until we reach together some agreement mutual.”
Daize. “What’re you doing, sequestering us forcibly?”
Ottavia. “There’s a cordon of armed hoodlums around the factory; we’re being held hostage. Do you have any idea who I am?”
Matheson. “Some big-shot owners’ representative? We never properly were introduced.”
Lea. “When you say that they are armed, you mean they’re . . .?”
Ottavia. “Armed! With guns and knives, like vigilantes!”
Daize. “Now we know who has been raiding the stockrooms.”
Lea. “Matheson, this isn’t safe. One spark, and . . .”
Sid. “I had nothing to do with this, any of this. It’s important that everyone realize that.”
Matheson. “Don’t fret. I’ve given firm instructions not to shoot inside the gates—unless provoked. But no one will provoke; you’re too outnumbered. Today we see a microcosm here, in fact, of macroeconomics: one or two exploiting profiteers, and scores of workers, human livestock, burden beasts, the many who by few are milked till dry. Acculturation’s slow hypnosis, a philosopher once said. It must be; what but mesmerism, magnetism, mind control, and lies could else subdue the herd, which could betrample anytime their herders? Today we break the trance, and demonstrate the might that’s dormant in majorities.”
Ottavia. “I will not submit to any speeches. You can kidnap, shoot me, knife me, beat or rape me, but you can’t force me to listen to you bloviate socialist claptrap.”
Lea. “Matheson, your quarrel is with only me. These others have no part in all this.”
Matheson. “No, everyone is implicated now, the highest chief executive down to the lowliest of janitors; and no one leaves until we’ve built a better world.”
Ottavia. “Fevered lunatic! The world makes people, and not vice versa. The flora in your guts have as much chance of changing you as you changing the world. You confuse for wholes what are only parts. Trust the whole to know what’s best for itself. The only thing the world wants from you is for you to pursue your own interests—that is what makes it strong.”
Matheson. “The cancer cell thinks he’s the highest purpose—”
Ottavia. “I’m not debating! How much do you make—your yearly income? I can guess. I don’t allow my socio-economical inferiors, still less my abductors, the privilege of contradicting me. I’ve heard it all a thousand times before. But have you, any of you, ever known, ever even met a real rich person? I don’t mean any millionaire, but a mogul, a tycoon, a fiscal sun round which there orbit a million millionaires like doting planets; I’m talking about the superrich, whose wealth exceeds your dreams’ imagination. Of course you’ve never, or for the status quo you would have more respect, because you’d realize it’s based on meritocracy. The superrich rule the world because they’re super clever, wise, and energetic, supremely nimble, staunch, fervid, and strong. They’re healthier and lovelier even than average people; they’re superhuman. When once you’ve met a truly rich person, the poor appear like lank imitations, pallid specters, mere dry offscourings, dust. Instead of being grateful that the rich exist, instead of praising them, thanking them for stirring your lumpen listlessness to some semblance of life, for carrying you about on their heels like pollen, you curse their weightiness and anathemize their interference!”
Lea. “What a lot of nonsense she does prattle.”
Sid. “Let’s not anyone provocate anyone else, and remember this all’s a big misunderstanding.”
Ottavia. “This cow’s uprising you preach is but the hallucination of a parasite who thinks he’ll survive without any host.”
Matheson. “The idle owner is the parasite!”
Ottavia. “You call them idle! They who orchestrate economies, who steer corporations, who engineer and doctor the commerce that keeps us alive! They who’d die of shame before they’d so shirk their obligations to humanity by hunkering down on a picket line!”
Matheson. “They suck the marrow from the workers’ bones!”
Ottavia. “And if they do, the more should you thank them for stimulating, enlivening, and whetting and honing you with the rough rasp of adversity—for putting before your eyes the image of a better life, indeed, a better you.”
A gunshot is heard.
Sid. “What the fuck! That was down on the floor!”
Matheson exits, and Sid goes to the window.
Ottavia. “You’d be plutocides, and kill off the rich, but in the process you’d exterminate your own potential; you’d excise your own organs before they’re even fully grown. You’d topple trees like termites, but from spite, not need—when you could yourselves become trees!”
Daize. “Everyone can’t all be plutocrat millionaires.”
Ottavia. “Doesn’t that make it more desirable? By narrow roads one gets to high places; worthwhile things are won with difficulty. What value would jewels have if they adorned every décolletage? Who’d cherish gold if our streets were gilded, or pearls if pearls were common as pebbles? I would rather make precious things more scarce, therefore more precious, than dilute their worth with ubiquity. I would concentrate vaster fortunes in even fewer hands. I would have richer rich and poorer poor! More giddy heights and more abysmal depths! Let us undergo every experience the human frame can support, play every note that the human instrument can sound. Let’s have women and men span the gamut from base to noble, from mud to ether, from insects to gods.”
Matheson enters. “A false alarm.”
Sid. “We’ll be killed by your dogshit alarms.”
Ottavia, lifting the telephone from the desk. “Did the universe, the creative force, lift itself from ooze primordial and differentiate, individuate, distribute itself in countless discrete parcels, but so we could undo its work? Your insurrection’s metaphysical, not political. You cannot have light without shadow, wave without particle, pleasure without pain. Your attack on the rich is an attack on disparity and imbalance, which is the force that drives, the ambidextrous engine that propels the cosmos onward. You’re worse than Satans! You’d depose the Tao, unweave the tensile fibers of the stars!”
She strikes Matheson over the head with the telephone. He collapses.
Daize. “What are you doing!”
Sid. “What the fuck!”
Ottavia. “You’d wage war against individuals, and boil this many-flavored earth down to insipidest pap. The only freedom’s individual freedom; you’d use yours to demolish the very system that gives it to you. The alternative to free and open competition’s not utopia, but totalitarian police-statism. You’d bloat government till each citizen’s her own probation officer, a bureaucratic functionary in charge of her life-file. You’d make an anthill of society; of men and women, robots who’d never spurn their programming.”
Matheson gets to his feet. “How dare you hit me in the head.”
Lea. “Take it easy.”
Daize. “How do you feel? If you’re dizzy, you’d better sit.”
Matheson. “My brains feel curdled, like a bowl of words.”
Sid. “He’s all right.”
Ottavia. “In the end, you’re steeped in hypocrisy; you embody it. ‘Equality’’s your battle cry, but how poorly paid are your waitresses and maids, your babysitters and your hairdressers? Do you know or care who makes your shoes, or what their profit is? Do you support your children’s teachers’ strikes? For that matter, how much allowance do you give your children for cleaning your homes and washing your clothes? You think you’re livestock; do you ever ask what quality of life your livestock and meat animals have? Indeed, you endorse the food chain and the paramount place you hold in it every time you swat a fly or eat a fine cheese. The fact is that life feeds on other life. You cannot clear a pleasant path through the forest without your massacring scores of ecologies. Well, the rich eat the poor; be happy to feed your superiors.” She throws open the door. “Your leader is hurt. I’m going for help.” She exits.
Worker. “Boss?”
Matheson. “Oh, let her go. She’s quite insane.” The worker closes the door. “I can’t believe she hit me in the head! That proves, if proof were needed, that the ruling class is doomed, and knows it: they’ll defend themselves like cornered vermin, rearing, hissing, tooth and nail—and telephone. The powers that be will soon have been the powers that were. That day can’t come too soon for me; I’m suddenly quite tired. But first: the war that fumigates them from their filthy nests and corridors of backstairs influence and leaves the world pristine again, and disinfected, new. I’ll get me to the gates. The flunky cops will be here soon. We’ll see who’s better armed. To think that she called us totalitarians!”
Lea. “Matheson, you’re still a bit unsteady, in your walk and in your thoughts. As far as I’m concerned, the strike is over, ended with your total triumph, every one of your demands fulfilled. You’ll have your jobs back Monday, at whatever wage you think is safest, bearing our new management in mind; I even am inclined, before I’m fired, to write you checks for three months’ back pay, since this whole commotion was incited by the ultimatum fraudulently foisted on us by Ottavia and the former owners. Sid and Daize by rights are welcome to their old positions too—or let them take whatever title pleases them. We might as well be all directors or all presidents, to make the new one’s task of sifting us more difficult. But stand your little army down, and hide your weapons quickly. We will vouch that Miz Farr-Mp assaulted you quite motivelessly. Also, you should have a doctor check you.”
Sid. “You could have a concussion, it’s true.”
Matheson. “All right. I do feel rather strange.” He sits at the desk. “We won?”
Lea. “Yes. It’s over.”
Matheson. “That’s good.” He faints.
Lea. “Call an ambulance.” She opens the door. “You both come in here.”
The workers enter. “What happened?”
Lea. “Mister Church was wounded by that woman.”
Sid. “He has probably got a concussion, we think.”
Daize. “Telephone’s broken. I’ll use the receptionist’s.” She exits.
Lea. “He’s in need of medical attention, which will soon arrive. Before it does, for crying heaven, ditch your guns. Or better yet, go home. The strike is done; we gave you everything. You work again on Monday.”
Worker. “Thank God.”
Other worker. “I told you it would work.”
Worker. “Still, I wish I could’ve shot this baby once.” They exit.
Sid. “I’ll escort them outside, and make sure that they leave, and in safety. —You mean what you said ’bout my job?”
Lea. “What’s it matter anymore what I say?”
Sid. “But you’ll tell the director I never resigned?”
Lea. “If you like, sure.”
Sid. “And that equalization of wages still holds?”
Lea. “Sure. Your salary’s as low as mine is.”
Sid. “Then you’re still my accountant, the best that there is. We won’t lap any shit from this asshole. We’ll stand all together, support one another. Without us, he’s nothing. He can’t run the place by himself.”
Lea. “If he gives us any fuss, we’ll strike him.”
Sid. “That’s the stuff.” Sid exits.
Lea touches Matheson’s head.
Daize enters. “Shouldn’t be long till the ambulance gets here. He’s bleeding a bit, but we shouldn’t compress it, in case there is swelling. Some ice would be harmless, though.”
Lea. “You should go. What’s left to do, I’ll handle.”
Daize. “Call me if ever you need other witnesses.”
Daize exits, shutting the door behind her.
Lea opens the door. Then, consulting Ottavia’s paper, she removes files from the filing cabinet and, as the sound of a siren grows louder, tears them to shreds.
FROM THE BEGINNING, Burris felt that there was something wrong with Oxley. His birth had been violent, and had caused him bruising, swelling, and a fractured clavicle, but there was much that it could not account for. His eyes were different sizes, and his ears weirdly misshapen. His feet both pointed to one side. Sometimes individual knuckles in his fingers moved independently of the others. His skin was at first too pink, then yellow; then, after a few weeks, it turned a purplish blue. His scalp was both flaky and oily, and his hands were cracked and peeling. In the first half-year of his life, he broke out in a series of rashes, each different from the last. He coughed a lot, cried when he was not coughing, and slept poorly. His stools, from the very first, were shockingly strange.
His mother saw no cause for concern in any of this. Rachel was simply enthralled by Oxley’s existence, and found proof, even in his screaming, of his uncompromising vitality. Also, because she was with him all the time, she was better able to chart the subtle variations in his fussiness, and to recognize in his calmer moments something not unlike contentment; sometimes, usually after pooping or puking, he even smiled. Every day he learned something new: how to lift his head; how to stick out his tongue; how to track a moving object with his eyes; how to clap his hands; how to sniff things before putting them in his mouth; how to spot her in a mirror, though her voice was behind him. Together they conversed in tones and inflections. She could watch him eat, or sleep, or make faces like a troubled executive, for hours. Time, which during her pregnancy had seemed like all the sunshine falling on a baking plain, now contracted to the cozy, fascinating flame of a single candle. Her son, warm and vital in her arms, was beautiful, clever, and dynamic, and she could not believe that he was unwell.
To Burris’s annoyance, all the doctors that he spoke to agreed with Rachel. Oxley’s symptoms, they said, were common in newborns, and would clear up in due time. He was only colicky, they said. Try not to worry so much, they said.
This blithe advice brought back to Burris all the feelings of impotent rage that he had experienced at the hospital, when his wife, after two days in labor, had been whisked away to an operating theater that he had been prohibited to enter. Left standing in the corridor, clutching the consent form that had waive
d his right to object if Rachel or their baby died, unable to imagine what was happening and powerless to do anything about it, Burris had resorted to prayer—a wordless prayer in the form of a bargain: if only Rachel lived, the baby could die.
It was the thought of a moment, and soon forgotten; but some small, unconscious part of him still gnawed on remorse.
“Have you been feeding him too much?” he would ask Rachel. —“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t let him lie on his tummy; it’s not safe.” —“No,” she would agree.
“You are overstimulating him. No wonder he can’t sleep.” —“Yes,” she said. But in fact, the only thing Rachel really worried about was Burris’s smoking in the house.
At last, when Oxley was eleven months old, Burris found a pediatrician who was willing to countenance the possibility that the boy was not perfectly healthy. Doctor Rubenand was dismissive of Oxley’s head-banging, teeth-grinding, copious drooling, and fear of strangers, but became pensive at the mention of his awkward crawling.
“Can you tell me, was there birth trauma?” —“What do you mean?” —The doctor looked at Rachel. “Was there any difficulty during the birth?”
“Well, his shoulder got stuck coming out,” said Burris. He was reluctant to discuss the matter in front of Rachel, who still cursed in her sleep and jumped at the sound of supermarket cash registers, which beeped like fetal heart monitors. Oxley’s birth had certainly been the most painful and debasing experience of her life, and Burris wanted, for her sake, to draw a line under it—to move forward and never think of it again. But he realized for the first time that it must also have been the most terrible experience of his son’s life.
“It was my fault, I guess,” murmured Rachel. “I kept pushing when they’d told me not to.” —“Nonsense, darling,” said Burris. “His position was wrong.” To Rubenand he said, “Anyway, they tried the vacuum, and they tried twisting him out.”
Rachel did not say that Doctor Paschava had cut her perineum, or that he had had, at one time, both hands and most of a forearm inside her. Nor did she say that Paschava had intentionally fractured Oxley’s clavicle to try to make his shoulders narrower. —“Finally,” Burris said, “they had to push him back in, and do a C-section.” For some reason this too had failed, and the doctors had at last resorted to reaching in through the cesarean incision to manipulate him out her pelvis. Rachel did not say that most of this had been done without anesthetic, the anesthetist being sick at home. Nor did she say that eventually someone, misreading her chart, had given her nitrous oxide, the one kind of pain relief she was allergic to, and that she had vomited into the mask and nearly suffocated. And she did not say that she had been able to see everything the doctors were doing reflected in the chrome operating light overhead.