Dan and I were issued adjacent rooms. Rooms practically the size of walk-in closets. Little beds, kitchen nooks, tiny bathrooms and tinier closets. Across from the bed was a little TV screen built into the wall. I set down my bag and opened the sink faucet to little more than a drip. I washed my hands and face, glancing eagerly at the bed in the tiny shaving mirror there. When I crawled under the thin cover, my feet hung off the end of the mattress, but that was alright. It was the first real bed I’d been in in days.
The building was quiet as a graveyard. Lying in silence, a twinge of loneliness settled in my stomach. It occurred to me crisply now, in the perfect quiet and in my unguarded exhaustion, where I was and what I had done. I’d left it all behind, the precious and the broken alike. I’d truly crawled back into my childhood bed.
I tried lying on my side, but the thoughts persisted. You weren’t chasing after anything when you got on that train, were you, Paul? Not like Dan had said. No, you were running. You’re a failure. And now you’re here, with your little feet hanging off the edge of a mattress. No matter how you tried, you just couldn’t swing it, could you?
It was nearly 4:00 a.m. by the time rumination gave in to exhaustion and I dozed off into an uneasy sleep. Dreams of hiding, dreams of failure, dreams of finality.
CHAPTER 4
I WOKE TO A KNOCK at the door. The sun was full in the little square window, casting three black shadows of the suicide bars across the white bedsheets. The clock said 9:45. I’d slept a good six hours. I swung my legs off the bed and went for the door. It was Dan.
“How ‘bout some breakfast, doggie?” He had that same grin on his face, only clean-shaven now with his wet hair freshly combed back. He had on overalls over a button-down shirt, cuffs rolled up to the elbows of his hairy arms.
“I’m starving,” I said. I was, now that I’d thought of it.
The ephemeral gloom I’d felt the night before had abated for the time being. Maybe some of it was the freshness of a new morning. But the fact of Dan waiting there, leaning goofily against my doorframe waiting for me to get dressed, I suspect, was most of it. I might have felt lonely, but I wasn’t alone. Not altogether.
We took the stairs down to the first floor. The breakfast bar was down to its dregs, but the look of food laid out for the taking was a relative thrill. Lodging had included fifty credits with our pre-approved vouchers, enough to feed us for a day or two, and we ate what we both agreed was the biggest meal we’d had in months. Not so fresh anymore, but grand regardless. Everything-brand eggs, toast, cereal, and a couple cups of Everything-brand coffee. “Gotta get tanked-up for the placement interviews,” Dan said. And we certainly did. My shriveled stomach was packed like a baseball. It felt good. Last night’s emotions all tucked into the pending file for the time being. I was here, and I had to make the best of it.
We walked and chatted, boarded a shuttle at 11:00 and walked into Placement fifteen minutes later. I recognized a few of the passengers from the night before, everyone fresh, well-fed, and ready to start anew.
“What’re you aiming for?” asked Dan.
“Hoping to get a job at the power plant,” I said. I’d always known the sovereign city had a huge gas turbine power plant and made its own gas and electricity. Unusual technology, supposedly, but I did know my way around a power plant, at least in several capacities. Enterprise was supposed to be tops in resource technology; the only one they couldn’t manage themselves was water, although I’d heard they were well on their way to figuring that out too. And when they did, President Carter had promised America, it would mean even more jobs for the destitute public.
“I never considered that,” Dan said. “When you think of working for Everything, you usually think of making stuff. Putting stuff together, that kind of shit.”
“It’s what I know,” I said. “At least some of it. Might as well hold up the Pledge of Usefulness.”
“The Pledge of Community,” Dan said. “But that’s close enough.”
Dan and I were waiting at the front of the line when one of the applicants receiving his placement began to raise his voice.
“I’ve got a Masters Degree,” he said.
“Congratulations, Mr. Simmons,” said the placement officer.
“I didn’t do all that studying, all that work, to wield a mop.”
“Mr. Simmons, there are no jobs for radio engineers here. Your practical aptitude assessments have you placed in the custodial department.”
“Come on, there has to be something. I’ll never be able to live on the salary of a janitor.”
Dan nudged me with a knowing elbow.
“We all get by on the salary of a janitor, Mr. Simmons,” said the placement officer. “We get by, so will you.”
“Remember what I said about pride?” Dan asked. “This guy’s gonna have a hard time paying the bill.”
I nodded.
Dan went ahead and took Mr. Simmons’s place. Soon after, a spot opened up for me. The placement officer, a stiff, young man, had me fill out a brief questionnaire on the computer. I indicated wherever I could that my experience was with a power company, and that’s where I thought I’d be the most useful. I hadn’t done a whole lot: basic electrical, maintenance, etc., but it was an environment I was familiar enough with. Most of all, though, I didn’t want to get stuck “putting stuff together,” like Dan had said. I really did want to make myself useful. I wanted to feel useful again.
After I’d completed the questionnaire, the placement officer fed it into the system and examined the results.
“Looks like they’ve got you a position in production.”
“I was hoping for the power plant,” I said, my stomach sinking. “That’s where I’d be the best off, I think.”
He glanced up at me from the screen. “The plant is off-limits to employees,” he said. “We’ve got you in production.”
“Off-limits to employees?” I asked. “Don’t employees work there to begin with?”
Something in his eyes let me know he didn’t care to discuss it. It wasn’t his decision where I worked. The computer decided where I worked, and the decision was final. I could take it or leave it, meaning I could take it, or kiss my apartment goodbye and shove off. They didn’t need me as much as I needed them. They didn’t need me at all.
“Alright,” I said. “It’s no problem, just curious.”
“The job is line assembly. You’ll receive all the necessary training, starting tomorrow. Report at 7:00 a.m. sharp to building 84-A. Follow the signs to the training desk. Your supervisor is Oris Smith.”
He printed out the paperwork, stapled it, and handed it back to me along with my voucher. “I’ve validated your lodging voucher for another day. Once you’ve completed training, have your supervisor sign this form and return it to Lodging for employee verification.”
I accepted the forms, trying not to appear disappointed. Line assembly. I’d be putting stuff together after all. I just couldn’t picture myself doing such paltry work.
“Any chance in the future I might get into the plant?”
He shook his head. “Only very specific personnel are allowed into the plant. It’s not going to happen.”
Dan was waiting for me outside the placement center. “Where’d they put you?” he asked.
“Production. No luck with the plant.”
He smiled. “84-A?”
“Yeah,” I said. “How’d you guess?”
“That’s where they sent me. I told ‘em the same thing you did. Hoping we’d both get in the plant.”
“You said you had electrical experience?”
“Sure, why not?”
I chuckled. “Do you?”
“Let me tell you something, doggie...” He put his heavy arm over my shoulder as we walked back to the shuttle station. “There’s no job you can’t do here. It’s all easy shit. I just don’t want to do it alone. Being a slave is one thing. Being a slave alone, that’s the pits.”
CHAPTER 5
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, working restaurants, delivering pizza, etcetera, I’d think a lot about the money I was racking up while I worked. I’d mentally tally my tips, trying to figure out how much I’d made so far, how much I’d averaged per-hour, and how much I could save by the end of the week. Money was novel back then, back when you could tuck some of it away, save a little bit. When you’re young, being broke is the norm. Anything above that is pure wealth.
Kids change everything, of course. If you’ve got kids, your pockets are empty. There’s no money to be saved, so the novelty is nil. Your base of operations is having enough money. Enough is plenty; the idea of a surplus is plain silliness.
Fail to make enough, though, and you’re in loser territory. And there’s no excuse by then; you can’t blame your parents, you can’t blame your situation, your race, your gender, your place in society. It doesn’t even matter that there are no jobs to begin with. It doesn’t matter that food is so expensive, that housing is so expensive. You can’t provide, you can’t pull your weight, and now you’re a failure. It’s a bad feeling. I know the feeling well.
Everything Inc. moves the baseline back to where it was when you were young. Money still lacks its former novelty, but at least the amount you’ve got will keep you clothed and fed. It’s like being back in your parents’ house; like regressing into comfortable, complacent childhood. Not a challenge to be had. Not the proudest place for a man to be either, but like Dan said, the pride is the door-charge. For a grown man who’s already been through the meat grinder, who’s already lost his house, his family, and who-knows-what-else, it’s a tough carrot to cough up. That might be the hardest part of the job.
The rest of the job is easy. Painfully easy. The necessary training, as the placement officer had put it, could hardly be considered training, and the job could hardly be considered work. Dan and I stood across from each other on the assembly line, repetitively performing our trivial duties. For me, I inserted a three-point pin into a three-hole plug. Pin goes into the plug, and I hit the red “done” button, adding one success to my hourly tally. The pieces moved on to my left, where Jack Johnson, a spiky-haired fellow in his mid-forties, wraps a strip of electrical tape around a group of wires, then hits the “done” button. Then on to Ronnie, with his sausage-fingers, who fiddles with a plastic hood until it clicks into place, “done” button. Then around the corner and on to Dan, whose job was to touch an alligator clamp to a screw and press a button. If the led-light lights properly, he sends it on down the line and hits the “done” button. If it doesn’t, he slides it back across to me, where I check to see if it’s plugged in right, then I send it back up to Jack to recheck his part, on to Ronnie, and so on.
The job was so simple, you could do it without using your brain. As long as you kept hitting that “done” button enough times per-hour, no one questioned your performance. At times we were quiet, just working like ants, each doing our little part. Other times the chat would start up and we’d be joking around, our hands working independently, leaving us free to bullshit.
We all shared our backgrounds, problems, failures, etcetera. As much as we were comfortable sharing, anyway. Dan revealed that he’d always wanted to be a writer, that he used to love to write fiction. He also told stories about his last run at Everything and how he’d had another go at the outside. It turned out Jack, who apparently hated being called JJ, had made a similar second attempt at the free world. “The grass is always greener,” Jack had said. “And really, it ain’t. I’ve been back and forth enough, believe me. You get fucked either way, just in different positions.” Dan agreed—the grass isn’t any greener out there. It was scorched earth out there. You couldn’t dig yourself up a turnip out there. “You’d sooner dig yourself up a dollar,” I said.
“I hear ya,” said Ronnie. He said that after almost everything I said.
“You’d sooner dig yourself up a nice new shovel,” said Dan.
CHAPTER 6
BACK AT MY ROOM after a long shift, the loneliness seeped back into my thoughts. The walls seemed closer than ever. I had this overwhelming urge to kick my door off the hinges. Not even to leave, but just to have that open space in my doorway to ease the close-quarters cramp. The second it crossed my mind, I heard the boots of the uniformity officer clumping by. Having your door open after curfew would earn you a nasty fine, leaving you scratching for weeks before you were back up to speed. Claustrophobia or not, it was prohibitively expensive to break the rules.
The clumps continued down the hall and around the corner and then they were gone. I allowed myself a moment to feel the childish resentment of being locked in my bedroom. The point of these rules seemed less about uniformity than about subtracting one’s dignity. Too much dignity would be a bane to a place like this. You had to be a genuinely beaten man to allow yourself to be locked in your bedroom after dark. A few years ago, I’d never have been ready for it. But now, here I was. I was that guy.
I sat down and yanked the laces on my boots and kicked them off onto the floor.
Knock knock...
I thought the noise had been my boots landing at first, but then I heard the knocking again.
Knock knock knock...
I listened. The noise was coming from the closet.
I stood up. “Someone in there?”
Knock knock knock...
I walked over and opened the closet door. The knocking was coming from the other side of the wall. I leaned in and knocked back.
“Heya doggie,” came the muffled response from the adjacent room.
“Dan?”
“You sleeping?”
“No, I’m up.”
“I feel like a kid sent to his room,” he said.
“It’s like you’ve been reading my mind.”
“How ‘bout a little mischief?” he asked.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Let’s make a little hole.”
“A hole?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean in the wall?”
“Yeah.”
“What? We can’t do that!”
“Keep quiet, they’ll hear us.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“That’s why I wanna make a hole. We can chat through it. Without being loud.”
“We’ll get tossed in the street, Dan.”
“I’m in my closet too, doggie. There’s no way for ‘em to find out.”
I thought about that. The closets were the one place off-limits to the inspectors. It was the only place in the room you could lock up your personal belongings. Theoretically, you could do whatever you wanted in there, and it was your own, personal business.
“I don’t know, Dan.”
“Just hold on a minute…”
I heard some scratching around behind there. Moments later, the blade of a long screwdriver thunked through my side of the wall. A little burst of dust hung in the air.
“Lucky it’s just sheetrock,” I heard him say. And he began winding the screwdriver around, widening the hole.
“This is bad,” I said.
“Nothing back here, no wires, plumbing, nothing. Just a couple sheets of wallboard. Easy as pie.”
Of course that wasn’t what I was afraid of. I was afraid of getting fired, of failing yet again. This was my only backup plan. If I’d run all the way to Enterprise only to become a failure again, I was truly finished.
The screwdriver withdrew, leaving a hole about the width of a silver dollar.
“Not too dusty, I hope,” Dan said.
“This is a bad idea, Dan.”
“Hear you much easier now.”
“Seriously, this is not good…”
The boots were approaching again. We both stood silently waiting for the officer to pass the other way down the hallway.
When he had gone, Dan said: “Well, what’re we drinking?”
“Very funny,” I said.
“Don’t worry, doggie, I’m buying. Hold on just a minute.”
The screwdriver came back through the wall.
“No, Dan, I hear you fine,” I said. “That’s it, that’s plenty.”
“Just another inch,” he said. “Keep your ears open for boots.”
I stood back. Rivulets of dust poured from the widening hole onto the carpet. I was faintly nauseated now. If we got caught, I could say I had nothing to do with it. My neighbor was crazy, that’s all it was. He went nuts and started stabbing the wall. It would be the truth, too. Dan was obviously losing his mind.
But there was no stopping him. Resigned, I went and put my ear against the front door. No one nearby. The uniformity officer must have been pretty well across the building. And on the positive side, it was highly unlikely anyone would complain if they heard the noise. The tenants regarded the staff more like predators than security.
The scratching finally stopped. “You there, doggie?”
His voice was clear now, almost like he was right there in my room. I went back to the closet. The hole was significantly larger now.
“Oh God,” I said.
“Success,” said Dan.
A moment later, a dark brown cylinder protruded from the wall.
“Can you get ahold of it?” he asked.
The moment I touched it, I knew exactly what it was. It was a cold, glass beer bottle. With a thwunk, I pulled it through the hole.
“Where did you get this?”
“Guy I know from last time through. Snuck up a twelver.”
“How’d you get it past security?” There was a security guard at the entrance that checked everyone’s bags, and alcohol was one of the many prohibited items.
“I gave the guard a few.”
“You bribed him?”
“He might be security, but he’s still a man. And men like beer, don’t they?”
A bottle opener presented itself through the hole. I took it. With a beer in one hand and an opener in the other, I was suddenly less dubious. After all, he was right. Men love beer, and I was no exception.
Everything Inc.: The Precious and the Broken Page 2