I got the knock a little later than usual that night. By now, I’d been conditioned like a lab rat to get my beer on time. Not the healthiest habit, but hey, I breathed plastic fumes all day long. If something was going to do me in they’d find my lungs turned to Tupperware before they worried about my liver. Classic rationalization, Paul Harper. I got up and unlocked the closet door.
“Where you been, Dan?”
Dan had stayed behind after work. I knew he was going to get beer in any case; still, he usually got back a lot earlier than this.
“Scribbling a little bit.”
“Writing?”
He sat down and handed me a beer and opened one himself. He looked like he’d had a couple already. “This whole place. It’s not really the rules themselves that bother me, it’s the restrictions you put on yourself to deal with them. You know what I mean?”
“Not really,” I said.
He sighed, took a drink. “You get up and go to work, work all day, then come home and go to bed. It’s the mindset you have to put yourself in to live like this. It costs more than just your pride. You gotta give up your aspirations, your expectations, your creativity. Because how could you live with those things? You can’t take care of ‘em. You can’t feed ‘em. They’d end up dying like neglected pets.”
I nodded. “They kind of own you.”
“Well I can’t do it doggie.” He chugged his whole beer and belched. “I remember Debbie telling me I was crazy for writing my stories, and that day I decided she was right. I guessed there was no point in writing my stories, fine. But what was the point in anything? Getting up, working, breaking even at best. What’s the point? There was no point. I was writing because I liked to.”
“Seems like a good enough reason to me.”
“No reason. You know how you’re doing what you’re supposed to do, Paulie? Because you’re doing it for no reason. Because there’s no point to it. Like breathing.”
“Pretty sure there’s a point to breathing,” I said.
“Bad example. You know what I mean.”
I did. I must’ve looked confused for a second because I was wondering what exactly it was for me; what did I enjoy? What did I do for no reason. “I get it,” I said.
“So you wanna read it?”
“Your story? Yeah, absolutely.”
He set down his beer and went through the closet into his room and came back with a short stack of paper and handed it to me. I took it. At the top of the first page it said: Flushtor: The John From Space
“I’ll read it right now if you let me.”
“I got my beer,” he said. “Have at it.”
So I read it. It was better than I thought it would be. Sure, it was loaded with puns—I never figured an alien would be such a potty mouth—but just like Dan, it was a good time and funny as hell. I enjoyed it. It wasn’t until later that I admitted to myself that I enjoyed it more than most of Moby Dick. And even later that I realized why I’d stopped reading like I used to in the first place.
It had been sometime during that period between when money meant something, and then suddenly didn’t. This period of dissipating novelty during which the cement and aggregate of life turns everything concrete. Imagination becomes kidstuff. Years go by. You lose things. You think you’re moving forward, but inevitably, you lose more than you gain.
I was lying in bed when that thought came to me; word by word, like a line of moving prose. My eyes opened wide, staring up at the darkness.
CHAPTER 15
AFTER DOING MY ERRANDS on Saturday, I thought I’d explore Enterprise a little more. On the far side of town I found an Internet cafe, something I’d heard about from the guys on the line. In the outside world, Internet cafes were things of the past, long-extinct since the Web became so mainstream. But here, without any signals not Everything’s own, access to the Internet was exclusive and strictly limited. By the time I went in and sat down in front of a computer, I’d forgotten all the things I wanted to look up. What I remembered was that anything I browsed would be tied directly to my account, so I’d have to be careful not to type in anything that made me appear suspicious or traitorous. Big brother was always watching.
But what harm was there in being interested in the company I worked for? I typed in “Enterprise power plant.” What I found didn’t seem particularly curious or secretive.
Enterprise was largely powered by gas, including the electricity, also generated by gas; highly advanced technology developed by Everything Energy, an Everything company; completely self-sufficient. All I could dig up about the technology was that it had its roots in old landfill methane-extraction. Some of this I’d known already; you could see all the garbage trucks in town carrying loads of waste to the plant for composting. Big deal. So what was the trouble with letting people work there? To protect the top-secret technology?
Just out of curiosity, I typed in “methane gas energy technology,” expecting to see some giant deposit under Nevada, but there wasn’t one. Could it be that all the methane came from a landfill? All of Enterprise’s garbage?
By the time I asked myself that question, I had used eighteen credits-worth of Internet. It wasn’t worth it. With the Internet so prohibitively expensive, if there was something you needed to research, you’d better know exactly what it is. Surfing just isn’t worth the money.
On my way back to the hive, the midday blaze was losing its strength. I saw a black man walking east, swinging a plastic bread bag at his side as he went. His clothes said he was homeless. And then I recognized him. It was Dave, the fellow Dan had recognized on the way in. I crossed the street and walked alongside him.
“Dave?” I asked.
He looked queerly at me. “Do I know you?”
“No, actually. I know Dan. Guy who used to work with you stamping product. Southern accent?”
“Dan... With the accent, yeah, I remember him. Is he back?”
“Yeah, he’s back. We live next to each other.”
He chuckled. “Man, I thought he’d end up on the street with us.”
“He’s something,” I said. “He said you’re something too.”
“Yeah, I’m something. You tell him I said he’s something else.”
“Want a cup of coffee?”
He bent an eyebrow at me. “You buying?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a couple credits left.”
“You’re buying, I’m your man,” he said.
We sat at a bench outside a coffee shop on the corner of the intersection. Make a right, and you’re headed back to the hive. Left, and you’re headed towards the outskirts of town, near the gates back out to the outside world. And the flood-channel entrances, if Jack had it right.
“I heard what happened,” I said. “With the fines and everything.”
“One fine was enough for me. I barely had enough to get by as it was. Add my lifestyle, and well… I don’t know if you’ve ever had any expensive lifestyle habits, but if you do, you know they take precedence over all that other stuff. Bills, rent, all that.”
He didn’t seem crazy to me, not the way Dan had described him. “I can imagine,” I said. “So the fine was enough to—”
“To put me out on the street, which was the whole reason I came here, to get off of the street. Well, at least I was used to it.”
“I heard a lot of you guys live down in the flood channels.”
“I squat down there most nights. I’m no channel rat though, I come up during the day. You gotta be careful not to get too comfortable down there. They’re wise to it, the law enforcement. They know we’re down there. And if you don’t know where to hide when they show up, they’ll snatch you up and drag you away. And we never see those channel rats again.”
I was stunned. “You mean they go down there and just drag you guys out?”
“They say it’s in the interest of public safety that we can’t be down there, interfering with the utilities and all that. And we never do anything like that, we just need a plac
e to sleep.”
“They’re utility tunnels?”
“Go from there,” he pointed back towards the opening of the tunnels “all the way out to the power plant. But we ain’t messin’ with no utility workers or no utilities. We just wanna live. We don’t want any part of that meat grinder you workin’ in.”
“It’s not so bad,” I said.
“See, you might not think it is, because you’ve got a little roof over your head and Everything brand eggs every morning, but I assure you. It’s bad. It’s worse than you know, and you’re gonna find out.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Every credit they give you, it all goes right back to them. The rent, the food.” He holds up his paltry bag of bread. “They give you a handful of credits, and you spend it all on their stuff for a profit. What they give you is nothing. What you give them is labor. It’s free labor. Know another word for that, Paul?”
“I uh...”
“Slavery. That’s the word you wanted to say. So ask yourself. Does this arrangement really feel fair to you? Having to live under their rules? Having to buy all of their goods. Just giving back all the credits you earn as a mere formality of the process you’re really in? Slavery.”
I thought about it a moment. It made sense, what he was saying, but still, I was so thankful to have the little roof and the Everything-brand eggs. Sure, the money they gave me was only a gesture of sorts; they would inevitably get back every credit. But if I had no genuine freedom, I had a pretty good guise of freedom.
“Enterprise,” Dave went on, “Gotta be the biggest joke you could call anyplace like this. It’s a slave colony. We built this company, this self-sustaining, mega-company from the tireless laboring of good people. But now it’s a monster machine that eats it’s own people. Consumes ‘em. What kind of organization is that?”
Dave took a deep breath and a long sip of coffee. “Well, I don’t work for ‘em anymore. But they’ve still got that pledge I signed. The Pledge of Usefulness. Meaning I’m still sworn to be as useful as I can to this joint. And one day they’re gonna snatch me up and wave that form in my face and say: ‘So what are we gonna do with you now, boy?’ And they’ll drag me out of my tent and down that channel.”
“Down what channel?”
“The tunnels. I’ve seen it happen. Follow the channel down west far enough and eventually they’re gated off. The channel rats stay away. Don’t blame ‘em. Because wherever they drug those people off to, they drug ‘em down that way.”
“What’s past the gate?” I asked.
“Hell if I know. The channels run under the power plant and out through the west end of town. They’re gated over there too.”
Again, Dave didn’t come across as crazy, not the way Dan had made him out to be. Eccentric, maybe; a guy who believed the world was after him. This conspiracy about people getting dragged down the channels. I remembered Dan telling me about his bad habits. Drugs would do that to you, make you paranoid. Still, I was curious about what he knew. Or at least what he thought he knew.
“So when you see Dan,” Dave went on, “you tell him I’m just fine. And speakin’ of fine, let him know I never paid a credit of what I owed ‘em.”
“I will,” I promised. I stood up and started putting on my coat. Dave got the message and did the same. If I didn’t start on my way back soon, I’d be flirting dangerously with the curfew.
“Thanks for the coffee,” Dave said.
“No problem at all.”
“If you need anything… Anything different...” He subtly thumbed his nose. “Or whatever... That east entrance to the channels. Just come on by and ask around. You’ll find me.”
CHAPTER 16
JACK AND RONNIE reported the next day that their buildings each had 220 units per floor, 20 floors. The same number as my building. It was pretty safe to assume that the other buildings were identical too. And if that was true, the numbers just didn’t match up. There simply was not enough room for all the employees there were supposed to be at Everything Inc.
“Where’s Steve been?” asked Ronnie.
“Steve?” I asked.
“He was here up until last week. Further down the line there. Red hair...”
“Right,” I said. “I remember him.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy got tossed out,” Jack said. “He was a snail on the line.”
He had seemed a little slow. In every sense of the word, really.
“It was like they made that performance mandate just for him,” said Ronnie. “Just as soon as it came out, they were all over his ass.”
“Hardly his fault,” Dan said. “His station’s a dog. Just like mine.”
“So what do they do?” I asked. “Move him to another position?”
“No idea,” said Ronnie. “Never been disciplined.”
“Dan over there’ll get it next,” Jack said.
“My only holdup’s when you guys fuck it up,” Dan said.
“He’s got a point,” I said.
“Send up shit that works,” Dan said, “I’ll hit that button faster than any of you bums.”
The guys had a chuckle at that. We all knew it was usually Ronnie’s screw-ups that sent the piece back to me; something about the way he manhandled those pieces together with his big, meaty fingers.
“Gotta treat those pieces gently, Ronnie,” Dan said. “Like a lady.”
Jack snorted. “Ronnie hasn’t touched a lady since... I dunno, doubt he ever has.”
“Treat her like your peter then,” Dan said.
“That’s no better. He’ll squeeze it to death.”
“When I get my hands on you guys, I’ll squeeze you to death,” said Ronnie, grinning.
Dan didn’t take the blunders personally, of course, but his performance did suffer for them. Whether or not it was his fault, if his light didn’t light up, he ended up taking the biggest hit for it. That’s just was the way it was with the structure of the line.
And it turned out we’d jinxed him by bringing it up. That same night, back in my room, Dan told me he’d gotten a talking-to from Orvis.
“I can’t believe it, doggie. The guy actually pulled me in the office and accused me of holding up the line.” He popped a beer and handed it to me.
“Did you tell him why?” I asked.
“Of course I did. But the guy’s all numbers, doesn’t listen to reason. It was the silliest conversation I think I’ve ever had. And I’ve had some silly conversations.” He cracked a beer for himself.
“What did he say when you told him?”
“Said to hurry it up, so I said fine, I would. Maybe I’ll just send some duds down the line, let the dude who replaced Steve deal with ‘em.”
“Then he’ll end up getting pulled in the office next.”
“Yeah, I know it. Nah, I wouldn’t do that to him.” He took a long swig. “Hey, on a lighter note, I’ve got this new story I’m working on...”
Everything went as usual for another couple weeks; Dan told his jokes, the guys and I broke some balls, and we all got our jobs done. Dan was spending a lot more time in his room writing, but we still got together at least four times a week, and when we did, he was like a whole new guy. Always babbling on about his new story he was into, trying to give me the gist of it without spoiling it. He seemed happier these days. And for the right reason, I knew. For no reason. He was doing what he was supposed to do.
But was I? One night after Dan left, I got undressed and got into bed and just lay there awake for awhile, staring at the shadows of the suicide bars in the window. I wondered what it was that I was supposed to do. I really had left it all behind when I came here; the good and the bad, the precious and the broken. I’d come here an empty vessel. At least with nothing to do, there was no way to fail. As long as I could keep on inserting the three-pronged plug in the three-hole thing, I was a certified success. A genuine item on the world’s dollar-menu, right, Paul Harper?
But what right did I really have t
o feel sorry for myself. Everyone here—at least everyone I knew—had also lost their families one way or another. Take Dan; his wife Debbie had gone in search of greener pastures herself. The grass is always greener, right Dan? Maybe I had less to do with my own failure than I gave myself credit for.
Failure seemed to hover out there in the free world, almost like a cloud waiting to burst at any moment. When Amy and I both were ready to admit the truth, that I’d never be able to take care of her or the kids like Dr. Thurmond could, I didn’t have the strength to mount a resistance. The rainfall was inevitable. It wasn’t about me, I’d been the sacrificial lamb since the beginning without even knowing it. How selfish it would have been to stand in between her and the life she deserved. Between Amy and the kids, and Dr. Thurmond.
I’ll never forgive myself for my speechlessness when Thurmond took me out for lunch and explained to me how I wasn’t the protagonist of my own story, not the way we all believe we are in the novelty of our youths. I wasn’t even a side-character, I was the antagonist. The bad guy, holding everyone back, causing all the problems. So what could I do but step aside? It was my final undoing, the most complete failure of all, and the perfect ending to the story. The antagonist is undone in the end by his own fatal flaw. That’s exactly what happened, just as it had since the dawn of storytelling. It could hardly be considered a tragedy. Not by him, at least. Probably not by the kids either. But that moment Thurmond signed the check and asked me if I had a couple bucks for a tip. As I reached in my pocket and dropped my last eight dollars on the table, drained of all dignity, unable to utter a word of protest, I became fully a trophy of failure to myself that can never be redeemed.
It was always after Dan stumbled back to his bedroom that I’d take out the trophy out to polish with self-pity. So I was a sucker. Fine. At least I was an award-winning sucker.
Everything Inc.: The Precious and the Broken Page 5