CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

by George Saunders

  “Say your husband’s a burly peasant who’ll kick my butt if I screw you,” he says.

  “My husband’s a burly peasant who’ll kick your butt if you screw me,” Connie says.

  “Wonderful,” Mr. Corbett says. “Now fall down and let me catch up.”

  Connie pretends to trip. Corbett stands over her in his king’s robe with his hands on his hips.

  “You peasant girls,” he says. “You peasant girls are all robust but naïve as to the ways of the world.”

  Lying there Connie scratches the side of her nose.

  “Say my harsh words frighten you,” Mr. Corbett says.

  “Sire, your harsh words frighten me,” Connie says.

  “I like that,” Mr. Corbett says. “I like that sire bit.”

  In violation of all specs I clip him in the neck with a rock. He just stands there looking stupid so I clip him again.

  “I don’t go for this,” he says loudly.

  So I clip him again.

  “I’m not the kind of man who pays good money to be insulted,” he says.

  I clip him again and he makes a perturbed sound with his wet lips and stomps off. Connie gets up and looking out into the woods asks who’s the smart-ass. She’s mad because of the possible negative impact on her Performance Evaluation. But who cares. I’m still her brother. If she insists on having sex with rich guys for pay she can at least do it where I don’t have to watch.

  “I know it’s you, Cole,” she says. “If you love me, mind your own business.”

  Then she tromps back up the trail, cussing a blue streak and pleading with Corbett to come back and feel free to kick dirt on her. Meanwhile I’ve missed my cue by a mile. The courtyard’s empty and the Clients are inside the castle making pigs of themselves while watching a troupe of Thespians bait an animatronic bear. I suspect my ass is in a sling. My experience has been that when the rich pay for Highwayman they expect damn Highwayman.

  I go out to the retaining wall and climb into the guard station. Down in the tent town the dispossessed are having a hoedown. It’s basically some floodlights mounted on gutted cars and pointed at a place where the dirt’s been raked. For music they’ve got a fiddler and five or six earnest teens playing spoons. Some of the dispossessed kids are floating paper boats in our offal stream. It may be offal but in the moonlight it looks poignant enough.

  After a while a few of the kids get bold and come skulking up to the wall. I search the guard station, then fling down some contingency dinner rolls. The kids squeal and fill their pockets and stand there yelling thanks and begging for more on the basis of how many infants they have at home.

  Finally I shout down that I’m all out. They’re sad about it and start back to the tent town with their crappy-looking shirts stuffed full of rolls.

  “Smell one,” one says as they go. “They smell so good.”

  The moon rises. The adult dispossessed wander off in pairs to their little shacks of packing material, as the fiddler stands on the hood of a car playing a sad good-night tune.

  In the morning Mr. Oberlin wakes me by paging me in a stern tone. I go down to Administration and he’s sitting at his desk with residual black bean soup on his lips. He eats the black bean every Tuesday to prove he’s a man of the people. The black bean’s an Employee staple. All day long the intrafacility PA touts its down-home hickory flavor. They don’t have to sell us on it, since there’s nothing else for us to eat. Mr. Albert’s there too, wearing some kind of arts-and-crafts cardigan courtesy of his squeaky-clean wife. Albert’s so stable and nice and generous he makes everyone uncomfortable. Oberlin points at a footstool with his nail file and says sit.

  So I sit.

  “Just for grins,” he says, “paraphrase me our Statement of Corporate Mission.”

  “Give it your best try,” Albert says kindly.

  “To allow the deserving to experience an historical epoch unlike our own in terms of personal comfort,” I read directly off their thirtieth-anniversary corporate ties.

  “Whoa,” Albert says. “Verbatim.”

  “Would you classify getting hit in the neck with a rock as experiencing comfort?” Oberlin says.

  “I suppose what Mr. Oberlins asking is,” Albert says, “do you think that actual medieval royalty members were frequently hit in their necks with rocks?”

  “Yes, my friend,” Oberlin says, “the Corbett cat is out of the bag.”

  “Tell me,” Albert says, scooting his chair close. “Was this a political reaction to last night’s vote?”

  “No,” I say. “He was degrading my sister.”

  “Albeit with her permission,” Albert says, handing me a mint. “We have her signed consent form.”

  “Another incident of this ilk and you may well find yourself wandering the wide world sans income my friend,” Oberlin says. “And no joke. Bear in mind that in your case we’re talking about a young man who was practically frigging born here, and who has apparently forgotten the considerable deprivations and pains-in-the asses of existing without a potable water source, not to mention security from rampaging gangs that mean him harm.”

  “Wow,” Albert says.

  “In many senses,” Oberlin says expansively, “I used to more or less like you in some ways. That’s why I’m asking you to objectively regard your situation. Take off your shoes.”

  I give him a look.

  “Just do it,” he says.

  So I take off my shoes. He sits next to me and takes off his.

  “What I’ve got going here are toes,” he says. “In your case, those may be fairly described as claws. Am I wrong?”

  “No,” I say. I could kill him for this. If there’s one thing I’m well aware of it’s the distinction between toes and claws.

  “These feet identify you forever and always as Flawed,” he says. “So even if you could somehow rid yourself of your Flawed bracelet, your deformed feet would scream out from every treetop the pertinent information on your unfortunate condition, by virtue of which, in the western portion of our nation, a man like yourself may literally be purchased and enslaved. Do I talk sense? Is this line of thought making a dent on your self-perception?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Then why the offbeat actions?” he says. “Why the continual flying in the face of the hand that feeds you? One more chance, mother, and I’m going to put you on the road to knowledge of how lucky you truly are in your present employment circumstance. And don’t think I won’t.”

  Clearly he’s threatening Expulsion. My stomach tightens. I try to look resolved and chastened and like I have a secret plan for corporate bravado. Out the window I see the McKremmer boys practicing their act on the Field of Battle by whacking each other with polyurethane jousting sticks while guffawing like idiots.

  “And if you insist on sighing while I’m talking sense,” Oberlin says, “that too will contribute to my overall assessment of you as some kind of squeaky wheel seeking grease. As for your sister, you yourself should strive to be such an admirable team player or noncomplaining spunky trooper. Which, mon frère, you are sadly not.”

  “And now for the bad news,” Albert says.

  “Inverse congratulations,” Oberlin says. “You are hereby demoted to Table Boy.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I say.

  “Company spirit, lad,” Albert says. “It’s the rudder on the otherwise wild boat of personal self-interest.”

  “Gleason party, Castle Two, three o’clock,” Oberlin says. “Immerse yourself in your role. Try not to screw it up.”

  I can’t believe it. Table Boy’s the worst Assignment I’ve had since I was six and a Wandering Gypsy. Back then we’d approach some picnicking rich and Heloise Bremmer would start in on her sexy fortune-teller routine. Next came the Freaks, namely me and Brian Rumbley. Brian had an eye in the back of his head and would read Chaucer from a book I held behind him. In truth his third eye was a nonfunctional glutinous mass and he’d memorized the passage. Still it was effective
. Then I’d do my dance. It’s a hard dance to describe but it involved my claws and a sheet of plywood. Whenever she was mad at me Connie used to call it Tapping Without Tap Shoes. Because of my tender age the tips poured in. No one stopped to consider what the degradation might be doing to my psyche. At night Connie would sing me to sleep and tell me not to worry, because the real me was deep inside and safe. I love her dearly but in retrospect she had no idea what she was talking about. The real me was out there in tights, tripping the light fantastic for a bunch of soused rich vacationers. The real me was pining for my mother while showcasing my disability for a lousy buck.

  Connie’s lot was no better. At the time hayrides through the Peasant Village were all the rage. Her job was to run behind a horse named Maid Marian with a shovel and a plastic pail. The constant fecal contact made her sickly. Whenever she missed her poundage quota they made her scoop poop after dark. Then she fell for a Client, the Normal son of a transportation mogul. They met at the fake stream. He was having a smoke and reflecting on life and she was doing our laundry. By wearing baggy blouses over her bracelet she was able to deceive him into thinking she was Normal. For a week they snuck off into the woods and made big stupid promises. Then while touring with his parents he saw her hunched over a steaming mound with a look of concentration on her face and that was that. Her heart was broken. Shortly afterwards she started going wrong. I’d find her drunk and wandering along the moat in just a corset, shouting obscenities at members of Grounds.

  And that was nothing compared to the going-wrong that followed.

  If you want to feel depressed, try watching your only remaining family member go off into the woods for a romp with a trio of law enforcement bigwigs from Mahwah.

  Connie’s Flaw is a slight, very slight, vestigial tail. You can barely see it. After her jilting she went through a bad depression and tried to sand it off. She got a serious infection and was in the clinic for a week with compresses on her rear. When she came out she was humiliated and refused to speak. A week later she turned her first trick.

  Sometimes I remember her at three years old on Easter morning, wearing a little coolie hat in the yard of the house on Marigold. We had a swing set. We had a bird feeder. We had a dog named Sparky. How we’d laugh as he’d caper around the yard digging at his anus with his mouth. When times got hard he was eaten against our will by our neighbor Mr. DeAngelo. Maybe it was for the best. A week later the militia took the house and we were driven out onto the road. Sparky would have been just one more mouth to feed. But still. Is it right that a couple of little kids should have to watch a grown overweight Italian man coldcock their father in order to bludgeon their dog to death with an eight-iron and roast it over an open fire? This was a man we’d seen swoon over a Christmas train set. This was a man who for laughs once ran through our sprinkler with a pair of underwear on his head. And there he was, weeping, dragging Sparky away by the paw. There he was, bellowing for his wife, cursing her for mislocating the Sterno cups, hacking up our pet with a cleaver in the shade of his bass boat. Who could forget his red-stained mouth? Who could forget him, satiated and contrite, offering Mom a shank?

  Connie’s a prostitute, I’m a thirty-year-old virgin, but all things considered, we could have turned out a lot worse.

  I walk past the beanfields and the Corporate Porcine Receptacle to cry on Connie’s shoulder in the women’s bunkhouse. The Receptacle is for the Dietary Supplement Pigs, hardened bits of which ultimately end up in the black bean soup. The Dietary Supplement Pigs are distinct from the Ambience Enhancement Pigs, which we breed special to resemble the coarse varieties extant during the actual Middle Ages, and whose primary function is to stand around the castle courtyard looking realistic.

  The bunkhouse is empty. Then the lowly Ramirez twins come in from a morning of hand-lugging dirt clods in the beanfields. Connie considers Lupe and Maria a couple of excellent arguments for remaining a floozy. They’re moral but not bright. They’ve got holy cards plastered all over their metal bedframes. They rarely speak and when they do are either proselytizing or claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary hovering above a moat. Last fall Mr. Oberlin suggested that Lupe might like to supplement her paycheck by spending some time in the Reward Suite with a high-school friend of his who’d done well in the arms trade. When she refused he made her work overtime. She kept panting by my window with her basket full of clods. Finally I went out to help and she gave me her holy scapular. Since then she’s wanted me. She sends me drawings of Saint Francis with my Employee Yearbook picture taped over his face. She’s sweet but too apocalyptic. You try kissing someone good-night who’s just told you for the umpteenth time that the world’s experiencing its last disgusting paroxysm before Rapture.

  Connie comes in and I tell her I’m a Table Boy. She says it serves me right. She takes off her blouse and says that in spite of being bombarded with rocks, Corbett’s decided to stay, and desires Bookish Queen Mother instead of the scheduled Ferryman’s Mentally Feeble Daughter. She asks if by way of apology I’ll help her suit up. I tell her no way She puts on a push-up bra and a fake ermine robe and some horn-rims. She says Corbett’s better than most, in that he’s nonabusive and buys her gifts off the record. She says she thinks he’s fallen for her. I accuse her of self-delusion. I ask her to reconsider for my sake and not have sex with him.

  She takes my face between her hands.

  “I am never, ever starving or being made a fool of again,” she says. “No matter what. I’ll sleep with the entire universe before I ever pick up another horse turd in a bucket.”

  Then she goes out the door and the Ramirez twins cross themselves in tandem and take out their checkerboard.

  The Gleasons are regulars. They’ve got a tidy nest egg that allows them to patronize us three times a year. Mr. Gleason’s an undertaker. When the first wave of mass death swept over the Northeast he got rich by inventing the Mobile Embalmer. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of chemistry could preserve a loved one on the spot, and for a fraction of the cost associated with traditional methods.

  I go in wearing my Table Boy duds and he’s stretched out on a couch being fed grapes by Lydia Bell, a closet radical feminist born without eyelids who’s always telling me about her secret plan to eventually slaughter some male Clients. For now she’s saving like crazy and biding her time. She gets revenge in small ways, like leaving bits of stem on Gleason’s grapes. Every time she does it she gives me a look. Gleason doesn’t notice because he’s too busy miming licking her navel whenever she reaches for her eye-drops.

  After the Feast we all hustle down to the walk-in as usual to wolf down the leftovers. Before long Gleason comes wandering in drunk with a gravy splotch on his tunic and gives a speech about how fair free enterprise is. He asks what percentage of us are Flawed. I say all. He says the fact that we’re not at each other’s throats fighting for our daily bread but instead are squatting in a walk-in enjoying food he’s paid for is testimony to the workability of this beautiful system. He leers and asks Lydia if she’d like to do some grape-feeding in a less formal setting.

  Then the Perimeter Violation Alarm sounds. Lydia rushes out ahead of me, gnawing on a roaster and shading her lidless eyes. Per specs we dash to the front gate, where a dozen members of Austerity are singing minor-key hymns and throwing buckets of black paint at our retaining wall. As usual one of them is dressed as Death Eating Chips to protest the reemergence of wasteful packaging practices. Austerity considers us decadent. They hate the fact that we market opulence. They kill a cow per family per year and use every single part. They make candles from the bone marrow and pudding from the brains. They boil the fat to make soap and use the leftovers to grease their looms. Their faces are pale and they have bony knuckles from so often going around with their fists clenched. The women all look depressed and wear bonnets. In their camps everybody works. The children work and the elderly work and the handicapped work. At one camp they had a baldheaded lunatic who paced and paced while reciting Browning,
so they tethered him to the water well and he wore a circular trough into the ground, but not before producing hundreds of useful gallons.

  They’re screaming up at us to reduce our Clients’ per capita caloric intake. They’re imploring us to refuse our allocated narcotics so we can see the power structure more clearly. They’re calling us brothers and sisters and asking why we honor the very mind-set responsible for the world’s sorry state.

  Oberlin’s screaming back that they’re only austere because they’ve got no other options. Gerard, Oberlin’s behemoth Security stooge, says let’s turn the firehoses on the loudmouths. I fall in with the others and we wrestle the hose to the top of the wall. Gerard turns on the water and we blast Austerity back to tree line. Death Eating Chips stumbles and because of the weight of his head can’t get up.

  “Immerse that particular sucker in water!” Oberlin screams. “I desire you to make that costume inoperable.”

  So every time the guy gets up we blast him in the legs and he goes down in the mud again. The costume’s coming apart. When it comes all the way apart we see that Death Eating Chips is a girl. In deference to Austerity’s policy of eschewing anything even vaguely degrading to women she’s shaved off her hair and plucked her eyebrows and is wearing a chest-flattening harness. Still, her beauty shines through.

  We stop blasting her.

  “Think!” she shouts. “Extrapolate your daily actions one-million-fold. Ask yourself if the things you do make sense. Then walk out of that Babylon and join us.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Oberlin shouts. “Honestly.”

  She picks up what’s left of her enormous head, then flips us off and rejoins her cowering wet friends in the grove. Singing “We Shall Overcome,” they march back to their camp carrying lit homemade candles.

  Gerard rolls up the hose and passes out our bonus cocaine.

  “Heads out of butts, everybody,” Oberlin says. “Fun’s over. Unless I’m mistaken we still have valued Clients to transport back to a time of quaint enchantment.”