“It’s a tough system,” said Dan. “But every system’s got weaknesses. Just gotta find the soft spots.” He wagged a finger through the hole he’d made in the wall. I had to grin.
CHAPTER 7
AFTER A CHEAP BREAKFAST of Everything-brand cereal and Everything-brand eggs, we were shuttled off to 84-A, greeted by the acrid chemical odor of plastic fumes. We filed out of the cars and onto the platform.
Vendors in their bodegas sleepily offered us coffees for two credits apiece. The small cup I’d had at breakfast wasn’t doing the trick, not after the four beers I’d had last night with Dan. I bought a coffee, dark and oily in a paper cup, and signed my name and pin to authorize a debit to my account. Curious, I hung behind at the coffee stand a minute.
“How do you do here?” I asked the man, a haggard, bearded fellow in his sixties.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Money-wise,” I said. “Not to be nosy.”
“You must be new.”
“Yeah, I’m new.”
He stroked his scraggly beard. “Same as you, one way or another. What do you do?”
“Production,” I said.
“What do you get? Money-wise.”
“2000 a month.”
“Alright, so I sell maybe a hundred cups a day. That’s two hundred credits, seven days a week. That’s 5,600 credits.”
I practically recoiled at the thought of it. That was 3,600 more than I was making in production, what was I doing there? He seemed to pick up on the entrepreneurial notions sailing through my mind.
“Everything brand coffee costs me about 1000 a month. Renting the space runs me another 1500.”
I did the math. “Alright, so you still take home 1,100 more credits than I do.”
“Then the so-called affluence tax. There’s another 750 gone.”
“Affluence tax?”
“They whack you with that one at 2,600 after fees. Brings my take-home down to 2,350.”
“Still beats my salary,” I said.
“How many days you work?” he asked.
“Six.”
“And I work seven,” he said. “So unless your time’s not worth anything, you’re making more per-hour than I am.”
He was right. Eight extra hours a week he worked, that’s thirty-two more hours a month. For a measly 350 credits. It wasn’t even close to worth it.
I walked away with more than just a cup of coffee—talk about waking up. So what could you possibly do here to get ahead? All you could make was just the amount you needed. All you could afford were the products Everything provided at discount prices. Paycheck to paycheck, that was the only way you could live.
I sighed, dissipating the steam of my coffee cup. Well… at least you could live.
CHAPTER 8
WE WORKED ALL DAY in the plasticine steam, (which did little to settle my hangover) assembling parts for Everything’s line of children’s toys. Little plastic houses, with little plastic doors. In our usual spots, I had the easiest task of all—I plugged the pin into the jack. DONE. Jack screwed together the little working doorbells you fastened next to the doors. Easy enough. A little circuit board, a battery, and a switch-button. He’d heat up the beads on the switch wires with a soldering iron and drop on the leads. By the time the assembly reached Dan, he pressed the button to make sure it went “ding-dong,” and if it did, “done” button. The next guy along fixed it into the door. Just like that. All day long.
“So check it out,” said Jack. “How many of these things are we cranking out an hour?”
“Ten?” I guessed.
“About that. And we’re making 8.33 an hour, four of us, to build ten of ‘em. That means, excluding materials, it costs Everything around three and a quarter to get one of these things built.”
He looked at Ronnie, installing the battery fastener. “Ronnie, how much you figure the raw materials to be?”
“I dunno, JJ...maybe five creds?
“Sounds about right. And don’t call me that. And what’s the retail, Ronnie?”
“Twenty-nine ninety-five, JJ.”
“Ding dong,” went Dan.
“And with our employee discount?” I asked.
“You thinking about having some kids, Paulie? In a place like this?”
“Just curious.”
“Half-price,” said Ronnie. Fifteen, give or take.”
“Fifteen,” said Jack. “Costs ‘em about eight and a quarter. Hundred-percent markup.”
“Some discount,” Ronnie said. “Some great act of altruism.”
“Altru-what?”
“There’s just no way to make money,” I said. “It’s like the whole thing’s designed to keep you running in place. Enough to get by, but that’s it.”
“That’s the idea,” said Jack. “And even if you could, what’re you gonna do, stick credits under your mattress? It just don’t work.”
“Why would you do that?” said a new guy down the line. “Aren’t they safe in your account?”
Both Jack and Ronnie chuckled at that. “You’re green as a baby twig,” Jack said.
“Too much in your account,” Ronnie said, “and they’ll whack you with the tax-axe. A credit over 2,600 at any time, and you get nailed for 750. I’ve seen it happen.”
“I heard about this,” I said. “Just this morning, from a coffee guy.”
“The coffee guys get it bad,” Jack said. “Cold months like this, they make a killing, but they cut ‘em right back down to size. 3,200, and they whack ‘em with a thousand-credit fee. 4,000, and it’s a 1,500 credit fee. And it just goes up.”
“Boom,” said Dan. “No matter how hard you try, we all walk home with the same little bag of shells.”
Twelve hours, we were at it. By the time I got back to the hive, my legs were wet cardboard. The guys had all told me I’d get used to it, and I hoped they were right. If they were, it couldn’t happen soon enough.
Taking a break on the way up the stairwell, a fire escape map caught my eye. I leaned on the railing a minute and studied it.
YOU ARE HERE, it said. It pictured an example of all 20 floors of the building. The hives were all colossal L-shapes, like the old strip malls of my youth, only much, much bigger. Leaning in closely, I counted up the units. Each floor contained roughly 200 rooms like mine and Dan’s. I also noted the extra-small units I’d heard about in the crook of the L, by the laundry and storage/utility units, and at the ends of the building. There were 20 of those per-floor. So 220 units per floor, times 20, was 4,400 units per building. As big as some towns.
Up on my floor, I glanced down the long hallway, full of doors. Everything perfectly uniform and grimly quiet. Strange to imagine there were so many people behind these doors, like sleeping bees in a colossal honeycomb.
CHAPTER 9
THE JOB SO MECHANICAL, the hours so long, and everything so uniform, the days seemed to amalgamate into single, week-long shifts. If it weren’t for Dan and me gathering in our closets for beer most nights, the tedium would have been intolerable. I mentioned coughing up the pride was the hardest part of the job; well, the second-hardest part is the monotony. The third-hardest is the long hours upright. Standing at the line all day will get you acquainted with every last bone in your feet, and you’ll wonder how they’ve held you up as long as they have. Everything Inc. advertises that the employees are the bones of the organization. The employees like to say: “sure, they walk all over us without even knowing it.” Well, if they walked on my foot-bones, they’d know it.
“At least my job is stimulating,” Dan said one morning on the line.
We all looked queerly at him, like what the hell is he going on about now? Dan touched the alligator clip to his nipple and feigned electrocution, earning a couple snorts of amusement up and down the line. He’d never let it stay quiet for too long without cracking some sort of joke. On an assembly line, humor is always worth the effort. Orwell said it best: “Every joke is a tiny revolution.” And since that was all th
e revolution we could manage, every snicker was a little badge of victory.
Dan had told me that day outside of Placement: being a slave is one thing, but being a slave alone is the pits. It was true; sure, we were working, but with the guys around to bullshit with, life in the trenches could be tolerable. The line was our own little social club, and we made the best of it that we could. We were all there because we had to be, but that was no reason not to enjoy the company.
As for hive-life, Dan kept pushing beers through the wall, and I sure as hell kept pulling them out. I felt bad sometimes that the other guys couldn’t be there with us. Even if they’d been in adjacent rooms, their closets would have been facing in the other directions. It was luck that Dan and I had ended up with our closets staggered together the way they were. I did feel lucky, but I resented the fact that the other guys couldn’t be part of it.
“I’ve heard the Japanese sleep in drawers,” said Dan. “At least we get to sleep in prison cells. Could be worse, ya know.”
I’d cleaned up the dust from the sheet rock and hung a little picture over the hole for good measure. Now, with Dan in his closet feeding me beers, the closet was like the little arcade-nook back at the Drug Fair of my childhood. It was the new, happening place to be.
“Gets you to work on time,” I said. “With the rooms so small, you can’t wait to get out of here in the morning. Even if it’s just to stand on the line all day.”
“I’d like to get out right now,” Dan said. “Go prowl the streets. Screw up the uniformity.” I heard the grin in his voice.
“That homeless guy you pointed to,” I said. “On the bus. How did he manage to sneak out at night like you said?”
“Dave? He bribed his way around, same as I do to get these beers up here. Only he pushed his luck.” His chair creaked. “Think about it. A few bucks here, a six-pack there; you can get people to turn their heads the other way, but once you start making noise, the stakes are raised. They want bigger bribes, you ask for bigger favors, and before you know it, the system’s broke, and you’re more trouble than you’re worth. I don’t know for sure, but I’d bet some of those guards moved to get Dave caught, maybe got him nabbed out on the street like he’d never signed back in. Only a guess though.”
“And you thought he might’ve died?”
“Died? Why’s that?”
“You said something like you were glad he was still above ground.”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I meant I was glad to see he was up on the street. Some of those channel rats never come up at all.”
“Channel rats?”
“The channels, underground. Old flood channels down there, some kind of drainage system. That’s where the old hobos squat to keep away from the cops. I’ve heard the real crazies never come out at all. So Dave might be homeless, and guaranteed he’s still the same crazy bastard, but at least he still comes up for his Vitamin D.”
“No kidding. How many people live down there?”
“Underground? Who knows?” He took a few long gulps. “He could’ve died too, I suppose, those bad habits’ll get you eventually. And Vitamin D deficiency.” his chair squeaked. “You know these studs are near twenty inches apart?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The wall studs,” he said. I heard him knocking at the wall.
“Well, the place is still standing, isn’t it?”
“Nah, that ain’t what I’m getting at. I’m thinking I could cut a whole doorway here. Imagine how much more comfortable it’d be with a nice little doorway.”
“Sure would,” I said, chuckling.
“Nah, I’m serious.”
“What?”
“Yeah, seriously.”
That anxious feeling crept back into my stomach. “No, come on. There’s no way we could get away with that, that’s crazy.”
“Starting to believe quite the opposite, little doggie. I say a hole’s as good as a door and a door’s as good as a hole.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But there’s no way that—”
Before I could finish my sentence, a drywall saw was poking through the hole. Then it was sawing sideways.
“Dammit, Dan...” There was no stopping him. Enough beer in the guy, and Dan was a freight train.
“You crazy bastard, where the hell did you get a saw?”
I got up and listened at the door, shaking my head. Is he really doing this?
When he had finished, there was a narrow opening between our rooms, cut to the metal studs. And there he was, standing in his underwear.
“Christ.”
“Now ain’t that nice?” he said, admiring his work. He coughed.
I realized I had sweat right through my shirt. “You’re out of your mind, Dan... If you get us in—”
“There’s no way for ‘em to know. The closets are our business, doggie. Looks like we got one over on ‘em after all.” The look of pleasure on his face was disarming. If I was appalled, the emotion was impossible to hang on to for long. Maybe we had gotten one over. And besides, what was done was done.
“And what the hell are we supposed to do with all this wallboard?”
Dan broke his sheet over his knee into two pieces and dropped them into the rectangular hole between our floors. They fell a story and landed on whatever brace was between the studs. I winced at the impact.
“Downstairs is the night shift,” he said. “No one there to hear it.”
I took a deep breath. He was right, there was no one down there this time of night. I broke my side of the wall in two pieces and dropped them down the hole as well. I felt a cool waft of the trapped air ride up between the walls.
“Well, come on in,” Dan said. “Sorry, I wasn’t dressed for company.”
CHAPTER 10
SOMETIMES WE’D HANG OUT in his room, sometimes in mine, always a case of beer between our swivel-chairs, which we’d carry room-to-room like briefcases. Dan’s room was a mirror-image of mine, but you could tell the difference by the condition he kept it in. His suitcase sat half-unpacked; he’d only taken out a few shirts, a stack of his novels, and this little “go-bag,” as he called it. It was a bag of emergency stuff, just in case he got himself in a bad situation he needed to get out of quickly. A flashlight, various tools, and his favorite toy: a locksmith’s pick-tool. A “lock-gun,” he called it. “Some people call it a lock-out tool, but I think of it as more of a breakin tool, doggie.”
I’d tease him about the go-bag, but he was unflappable in its defense. “You should have one too” he’d tell me. It seemed the hallmark of the chronic troublemaker, and that, he’d certainly proven to be.
Once he’d drank enough, he’d invariably bring up his discarded literary ambitions, sometimes with humor, more often with undertones of regret. He never told me just why he’d given up writing in the first place, only that it had been a kind of “bad habit” for him. Things just hadn’t worked out the way they were supposed to have, I supposed. I supposed they hadn’t for anyone around here.
I’d still have the occasional twinge of loneliness from time to time; this lingering grip of regret for all I’d left behind. The precious and the broken alike. But just the same, I’d have occasional twinges of thankfulness. It wasn’t so bad, relatively speaking. I wasn’t alone, not altogether so. Not at all, actually. I’d been more alone on the outside, at least since the enchilada went ahead and fell apart. And I wasn’t the failure I’d been on the outside, not necessarily. Not anymore. Not here.
Failure. When I was a kid, the big thing at all the fast food places was the dollar menu. Once the meat was all but plastic, all the burger joints could do to stay competitive was to drop the prices to a buck. A patty of who-knew-what, a pickle, a dollop of ketchup and a bun. One dollar.
I remember thinking that no matter how bad things got, you could never starve in this country. If your kids were hungry, you could take them to McDonald’s and feed them for pennies. You could sit in one of those colorful plastic booth
s and eat dinner with them, and they’d enjoy it too. And you wouldn’t be a failure, not that night; at least you wouldn’t seem like one. You might know deep down that you were good for nothing, but the kids wouldn’t know it. At the time, it was a comfort to me. If only that were all it took to keep a family together. A few burgers and my own good will.
Dan was already out and about by the time I woke up on Saturday. He’d planned to sit out in the park area and read his sci-fi anthology until the sun went down. “Tanking up,” he called it. “To keep the brains flexible.” God knew, we didn’t flex our brains too hard during the week. I thought I ought to start reading again too, maybe not all day, but a little here and there, just to keep my own brains flexible. But first, I needed to pick up some provisions.
The cafeteria was closed on weekends, so I bought a can of coffee from the vending machine in the lobby for two credits and checked out at the front desk and hit the street.
I recognized a couple of people from my floor on the way to the markets and I waved hello. They waved back tentatively, checking around for security and uniformity officers who might deem the gesture suspicious. All around, an air of quiet complacency seemed to keep everyone facing strictly forward. As I walked, I felt this sensation of boredom; not my own boredom, but this looming fog of malaise. The uniformity, the security, it seemed to infect everyone and everything. A little black bird landed to peck at a crumple of paper on the sidewalk, then flew away again, apropos of nothing.
Uniformly arranged rows of shelving at the market. Everything Inc. used this drab packaging that left the boxes of food difficult to identify without seeing the pictures up close. Boxes of macaroni with their packets of powdered cheese seemed popular; a whole row dedicated to what I’d heard called “Kraft dinners,” disheveled on the shelves. I took two, four credits apiece. I had about 100 credits I could spend without breaking my budget for the week.
Everything Inc.: The Precious and the Broken Page 3