I can’t help wondering if these feeds were chosen for my attention, strategically, or whether they are just part of the continuous, autonomous viewing.
I watch the feeds. The Mysterious Woman.
The Director watches me. So does his medallion, staring out from its single black-and-silver eye.
“Do you recognize her, Mr. Frobisher?”
It is just him—he has dismissed his aides for this occasion. I’ve never been truly alone with him, and if this tête-à-tête is meant to intimidate, it’s working. We are seated at the barely large-enough table, across from one another, and we have to be conscientious in order for our knees and feet not to touch. The confining situation is especially precarious because of his size. His belly periodically pushes up against the table, which then moves toward me in small increments. I sit almost sideways, and the surface area I am occupying is getting smaller by the moment. The joystick stands at attention between us. The images on the walls unspool.
“Of course I do,” I finally reply.
“She is an interesting specimen.”
“Specimen?”
“Case study, Mr. Frobisher. You are all my case studies, and as such, fascinating to me. Even you, Mr. Frobisher. Do you resent being a specimen? If I am to assist you in your reaching your MAXIMUM POTENTIAL, I must study you, mustn’t I? If I am to help you to lead your BEST LIFE?”
“I suppose, but—”
“And ARE you? ACTUALIZING? Finding your OWN TRUTH? We aren’t in any way DISTURBED by recent circumstances, are we?”
“What circumstances?”
“Exactly. That is PRECISELY the attitude to have.”
I hardly know where to look. The monitors remind me of eyeballs disconnected from brains.
“Sorry. Can we turn them off?”
“We’re rather PROUD of our network, actually. Everyone welcomes it—the grid, the spectacle. It is distributed throughout the program, all the devices, and it doesn’t exist without everyone’s—without your own—contribution. Which is to say, Mr. Frobisher, that the grid here is not so much a case of us watching you as you broadcasting YOURSELF. Think of it as community building. An investment in real-time, social-validation feedback. Either way, a GREAT BOON to us all.”
The Director declaims for a period on the benefits of sharing/volunteerism…
I look down at my device, and it is just humming away happily.
“You will acclimatize. You might come to enjoy it, in fact. Even your own participation in it all. Especially that. Let us consider this a rung on THE LADDER. A growth stage. Not to mention that perhaps there may be something in all of this participation—these membership contributions—for your project? An idea? A motif? Some sort of idea which properly reflects our core principles here? Our promotion of collectivism as praxis? Toward a philosophy of a COMMUNAL project? But your work is still languishing on the drawing boards, isn’t it—you are still struggling to get it all airborne. Flagging. Still in labor. So disappointing. So DISCOURAGING. Despite everything we have done for you, despite all of our help. Despite our CONSIDERABLE OUTLAY on your behalf. All our attention; all of our investment; all of our CARE.”
The Director now affects a kind of grief-stricken expression. “Stuck. It is a little bit unacceptable, frankly. And hard to fathom. Our operating system is proven. User tested, back-end tested, compatibility tested, speed benchmarked, and certified. Where is the gratitude? The humility? The (all-but-crucial) SURRENDERING ourselves to the Institute’s higher authority? And, your project is now just one worry among your other concerns, isn’t that right, Mr. Frobisher? Which brings me back to THE MATTER AT HAND—the question of your passport.”
“Yes.”
“Your passport,” he repeats.
“What about it?”
“Don’t be clever,” he says, drawing himself up and extending an open hand.
I scan the exits.
“I may have misplaced it,” I stammer. “Give me a day or so to scour the flat?”
“I’m a busy man, Percy, and I think you will find that it WILL NOT serve you to try our patience.” The hand closes to a fist.
“Not long, I promise. I do wonder though, if I give you my papers, I won’t be better than a priso—?”
The fist opens and raises to become a stop right there gesture.
“Allow me to preempt your question,” he says, slipping now into a self-consciously aggrieved and confessional mode which is every bit as frightening as his evangelical one, if not more so. “ALAS, we must keep track of all our fellows’ visas, travel and identity papers. The Freehold demands it of us. These are the regional RULES. We are asked by the local constabulary to keep an eye on our fellows’ papers for safekeeping. I’m surprised you don’t know this, it is—”
“I know. In the contract. What do you mean keep an eye on?”
“LAW OF THE LAND, I’m afraid,” and he heaves his broad shoulders upward to indicate his helplessness, “you are our problem. My problem. Now, we don’t always take physical possession of a fellow’s passport, but in SOME CASES—where we may have reason to suspect that we might have NEED of them, where we suspect they might be handy to have nearby, where we guess that some sort of INCIDENT might be liable to arise between the fellow-in-question and the Institute, or the Freehold in general—in such cases, we ask for them. For SAFEKEEPING, understand.”
The back of the huge hand now runs over the monitor which displays the Mysterious Woman, as if in a lewd caress. (Meanwhile she continues on about her business, oblivious, in such high focus I can see each of her pores.)
“I don’t know what to think. It is hard to swallow, being kept.”
“Always the visitor. Such ITCHY FEET. As I say, Mr. Frobisher, you’ll get used to it.”
He smacks the hand down open-palmed on the table and laughs, rises, and the wake of his distended belly finally traps me between the table and the wall.
A gap.
* * *
—
I am being led down the dim corridors (which seem to only turn in a single direction over and over, which would indicate a circle or at best a kind of cochlear spiral) when the Director mentions, casually, “I see that you and Mr. Royal are friendly.”
“Not especially. Are we?”
“Aren’t you? I could be wrong, Mr. Frobisher. Of course, it is VERY HARD indeed to keep names and faces straight here, isn’t it,” he admits, ruefully. “So many men and women, so many fellows and admins. And so many of you with a legitimate claim to SPECIAL STATUS. Do you make such a claim, Mr. Frobisher?”
“No, of course not. Not any more than anyone else. I’m just here to do my work. Keep my nose down.”
“Your work, yes. Baffling. Can’t say I can make heads nor tails of it.”
I stand there, mute, not wanting to go down this road again. But he continues, taking a single step closer to me:
“That’s fine,” he goes on, “just fine. You don’t like to speak about it. Though, sometimes, we all need to just get things off of our chests, let it all out. Helps move things along. Don’t you think? Otherwise one could calcify. Constipate. Just HARDEN RIGHT UP. And who knows what happens then. If we are alone with our thoughts for too long. People become weird under such circumstances; ESTRANGED FROM THE REAL. They go off the reservation, as one says. Sometimes quite literally; isn’t that right? Well, listen to me go on, I’ve been giving a speech. A Discourse™ of my own! Don’t mind me, but I have pressing matters to attend to—minds to PRIME AND CLARIFY; tasks to recenter; connections to refresh; I must hasten to INCULCATE BELONGINGNESS, to render PEAK EXPERIENCES. No time, no time! And you’ll get those papers to me then? You’ve promised, don’t forget! TOUT DE SUITE. Don’t make me wait.”
And with a showily decorous and surreally awkward sweep of his arms, the Director pushes the exit door open with a bang,
and prods me out of it.
Make haste, Same Same.
Make haste.
PART III
CHANGES
32
(THE PAPER CONTINUED)
Some of those pages slink into a window leading into a high floor of the Arts Pavilion. They make their way down a flickering corridor, hugging the tiled walls like a SWAT team.
They pass a white room; a room as white as they are. Flutter on in. There’s a pale green curtain on some kind of freestanding, aluminum, tubular framing system. The curtain now draws to reveal the Mysterious Woman, who is hard at work on a project of some sort.
The work involves a bag and a tube, and a bed. And several assistants.
One of these assistants swipes at the paper fluttering in front of his face; swats once, twice, and then, irritated, returns to his strange work. Only minutes later, he looks up again, and now expertly snatches the sheet out of the air, and calmly clips it to his clipboard. He begins writing on it. His expression quickly changes from pleased to grave. Then, someone shouts: “Bloody hell—who let you in here?” as the curtain slashes closed. The papers are blown backward and out of this forbidding place.
(AN ATTACK, AND A REPULSE)
We sit in wire chairs upon the gravel, next to the dead water in the stilled fountain, concentrating on the gray concrete checkers table. My hair is sticking to my forehead and my shirt to my chest and arms. (Hot. Humid.) Occasionally a tiny drop of water falls into the pool, causing identical and concentric ripples to broadcast out toward the water’s periphery. Each drop of water that lands in the fountain does so with a noticeable, round little sound, which indicates to me that it has fallen from a great height. Though it cannot be rain of course. Perhaps it is this new, internal heat, causing condensation to accumulate on the interior surface of the metastructure. Idk.
The board is set now, and we begin.
1. Preliminaries
2. Home Rank
3. Assessing the Table
4. Will o’ the Wisp
5. Etc., Etc.
6. Misdirection
7. Poise in the Face of Great Difficulty
8. Lines of Attack
9. The Stage Is Set
10. En Masse
11. The Race Is On
12. Consulting the Rulebook
13. A Small Sacrifice
14. A New Salient
15. Feint (A Snow Job)
16. The Line Holds
17. Retrenching
18. White’s Move
19. Volte Face
20. Forward, March (A Venetian Salvo)
21. Vingt et Un
22. Penetration
23. Out-on-a-Limb
24. An Opening
25. Price Paid
26. High Block
27. Assessing the Flank
28. Seeing the Big Picture
29. Sleight of Hand
30. Textbook Exchange
31. Pincer Movement
32. Flight
33. Another Piece Taken
34. White, Massing
35. Inferno
36. Carving a Path
37. Showing Character
38. A Fresh Front, Opened
39. Back and Forth
40. Mass Hysteria
41. A Soldier, and Brave
42. Influen(za)ce
43. Important Piece, Removed
44. Fundamental Thrust
45. Five to One
46. Other Gambits
47. Deadlock?
48. Hysterica Passio
49. Oceans of Time
50. White Cedes Ground to Black
51. Brief Intermission
52. Final Push (Waterloo)
53. Chaos
54. Game Abandoned
“Again?”
He doesn’t respond.
I arrange the pieces back on their home stations. Mr. Al’Hatif stares into the middle distance.
Now he leans way forward, and I think for a moment that he will pitch all the way onto the board, headfirst. But he only goes as far as my left ear, into which he whispers:
“No one is safe.”
I pull back from him to see if he is referring to the game (no), joking (no). His face remains expressionless.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Al’Hatif picks up a checker, very slowly, only to put it back where it originated. He doesn’t answer me. (He’s been lumbering around, my friend Ousman, not, as you’d expect, in some kind of postcoital, post-project glow, but rather with a spent sallowness, a marble-eyed weariness. Some sort of chemical transformation has taken place in him, due to his project and Discourse™ completion, and now he seems quite the different person. Dulled. Anaesthetized even.)
“No one is safe,” he says to me again, as I rub the moisture out of my socket with a knuckle, “not even you.”
He has listed in his chair a bit, so I shove him on his lower shoulder until he is upright again.
“Up you get. There, there.”
Just then, I hear another drop land loudly in the pool, and as I’m looking up, trying to track its source—which I determine to be the sweating metastructure, high above us—another droplet hits me squarely in the eye.
Ack.
Mr. Al’Hatif has fallen asleep. The Styrofoam cup he has been clasping is leaning over and some of the brown fluid is dribbling out. I take it from him and place it on the gravel beside him, pull up his blanket over his slumped torso. He whimpers contentedly, and I leave him to it.
(THE PAPER CONTINUED)
The paper has begun to organize itself. It is becoming orderly.
Back when the paper first began to emerge from the Same Same shop, it did so chaotically. It was rapidly, rudely, evacuated out the door like so much rubbish. But now, the paper has formed long, well-ordered lines. But things are getting tidier.
The papers are now in constant taxi and takeoff, following a protracted and roughly parabolic flight path between the Same Same shop and the Institute.
Naturally, all of this activity raises important questions. For example: Does anyone notice?
Such an enormous event. You’d think someone would…
(OF COURSE—A WOMAN!)
Her head is a silk scarf, the rest of her is a beige pantsuit. A low-slung leather handbag—the strap of which is visibly cutting into her right shoulder pad—bulges with a laptop case and assorted peripherals. She lifts a brushed, metallic canister to her lips, and begins to suckle the bitter, antioxidant froth from the built-in, flip-up straw—allowing the fluid to play, coolly, on the space in front of her teeth. A lot on her mind. A lot on her mind. She’s en route to the digital hangout she is running lead on this A.M.: a meeting featuring drop-ins from several crucial, far-flung stakeholders in the global consulting firm in whose employ she currently labors, at a desk deep inside one of those crazed office towers straight up ahead, specifically, the one shaped like a cluster of space crystals, this building sitting flat against the sky like the painted background art from the cover of a sci-fi magazine, and toward which her feet are being mag-lev’ed by that same caffeinated witches’ brew, ten ideas jostling for her attention: two of which concern her newly updated and shared, multihued, multitiered schedule; four of which concern projected cost (and the reporting thereof); one, which concerns in
ternal corporate structure and which requires its own dedicated mental org-chart, one revolving around a single slight, put out offhandedly by a reviled colleague, which was suffered during a webinar just days earlier but which still throbs with the periodicity of an ingrown toenail, and the plans she is formulating to redress the pain as well as the insult; the most persistent (suddenly) of her thoughts concerning her spidery but also resilient micro-mesh underwear, the label of which has folded in on itself uncomfortably, and is now pressing itchily on her already sore L3 vertebra, the chakric source (the company’s lunchtime yoga instructor informs her) of problems related to painful periods, miscarriage, and bed-wetting—only the first of these being an actual concern (though with everything else she has to contend with she might as well add bed-wetting to the jeremiad, why not, why not; bring it on), and of course her general back issues would clearly be resolved by obtaining a new chair from office services but she keeps forgetting to put in the call—forgets for obvious reasons really, given her already strenuous mental agenda—not to mention things would defo improve if perhaps she just carried less shit around every day, and maybe even switched to some core workouts in order to strengthen those opposing abdominals, but the important thing here is that the entire situation—itch, itch, itch—when taken as a whole (she thinks in her unexpectedly philosophical, ninth thought) is so emblematic of the Modern Condition, that hackneyed parable—and (thought number ten) so totally modern is our condition here that even the very platitude of “the Modern Condition” itself is now reified into subject matter for even such further clichés as 1. her own warmed-over thoughts and 2. her own running account of these thoughts, and god, she thinks wretchedly, I have become a metaphor—when, stopping to discreetly rearrange her underpants-label situation, she hears a flapping noise, and looks up from the various social feeds she happens to be also absentmindedly unspooling, only to notice that, overhead, there is something happening. Something of serious note.
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