“But why are we flying on it? It’s ancient.”
“President Bradford has issued an executive order that all planes be disassembled, and that their aluminum and titanium parts be melted down. This plane, actually, is the only one left. They found it under a tarp on an abandoned airstrip in the Mojave Desert.”
The pilot powers up the plane, and the engine roars.
“I can’t remember the last time I heard the purr of a combustion engine.”
“Thank God technology reduction measures are the cornerstone of Bradford’s agenda. He’s meeting his promises.”
“Everybody knows politics are a farce built on corrupt morals, ridiculous boasting, and slander. Who does this guy think he is?”
“Bradford is the straightest shooter we’ve got!” she says. “The moment that judge from Seattle issued a block saying its unconstitutional for the government to destroy the assets of private businesses, Bradford appealed, as he should have. After all, he has a mandate from the people!”
The pilot’s voice comes over the plane’s intercom, fuzzy and distorted: “It’s been a few years since I’ve had to fly manually. But don’t worry, I’m sure it’s like riding a bike. Flight attendants, please take your seats.”
The plane races down the runway, shaking and rumbling. I can see the wings jogging up and down and feel there’s a good chance this thing will crash. A half-dozen air masks drop from the ceiling onto the seats in front of me as we lift off, and soon we’re piercing through wispy clouds.
“Sorry about that folks,” the pilot says after the plane levels off. “Just dusting off the cobwebs!”
I thumb through my magazine to an article on the hottest new fad, talking toys, featuring an animatronic stuffed bear called Teddy Ruxpin. The headline reads: “The Future Is Here!” With its moving eyes and ability to read stories played from an audio cassette in its back, it’s sold over fifty million units!
In prison, I had to invent my own world, new philosophies, folklore, creation myths, language, games. It was my one source of comfort, the only thing that enabled me to bear my solitude. For a brief time, I was my own God, as it were, my own creator. Now I’m back in a world I share with hundreds of millions of other Americans, and yet I am a stranger in this land, disconnected from its ideologies and values.
Pens and paper haven’t been used for nearly a decade, but when I ask for something to write with the attendant brings me two spiral notebooks, four blue pens, two red pens, a black marker, and a box of crayons with which I craft a series of charts and diagrams that illustrate the ramifications and consequences of this new Luddite ideology. Never has my mind worked at such a frenzied pace. The solution sets to complex problems in the fields of quantum mechanics and ergodic theory reveal themselves to me as clearly as my face in a mirror. In the history of humankind, perhaps only John von Neumann and maybe Sir Isaac Newton have experienced similar bouts of intellect.
My initial findings are disheartening, to the say the least. If I’m to follow my hypotheses to its natural end, my only option would be to kill myself, as quickly as possible. I’ve committed to take Mr. Toczauer’s pill just as I stumble upon an alternative theory: nothing evolves as we think it will! The final sentences of my masterpiece, The Manifesto of a Generation, are: “If it’s the truth you want to stand before you, you must never be for or against anything. The struggle between for and against is our fatal flaw!”
48
Upon landing, I’m met by a half-dozen soldiers, none older than eighteen years of age, wearing fitted brown uniforms branded with the Luddite symbol of Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. They lead me through an underground tunnel built during the Kennedy administration. Everything is made of concrete. The path is lit by harsh yellow incandescent lights lined up as far as I can see, in perfect uniformity. Not an imperfection is to be found.
After thirty minutes of walking, we debouche into what appears to be a library. The room is three stories high and lined floor to ceiling with books. A team of men are working diligently, pulling the volumes off the shelves, loading them into wheelbarrows, and carting them out the back. Whenever the door swings open, a blazing fire comes into sight, and black smoke pours into the room.
Karl is the man directing this purge of knowledge. He does so with tremendous enthusiasm, hollering at the workers.
“It’s the information contained in these books that oppresses you. Rid yourself of this poison and you’ll be free!”
I look at this man with poor manners and bad teeth, and I marvel at how he’s found himself at such a place.
“Henri, my old friend,” Karl says as he shakes my hand. “It’s so good to see you again!”
“Because of you, I’ve been rotting in jail, Karl.”
“Let’s not dwell on the dirty deeds of the past. It’s so much better to forget. And anyway, the end justifies the means, wouldn’t you say? Everything we discussed at our meetings is happening!”
“How did you get here?”
“I’ve been working for Bradford for months.”
“From jail?”
“I was released.”
“For giving me up?”
“I’ve been named Deputy Assistant Secretary of Technology Divestment.”
Karl leads me outside, past all of the book-burning workers humming with activity. The air is black and thick, and from the sky falls a blizzard of ash. We hurry down a crooked street lined with shops, where all variety of tradesman are practicing their crafts. In a cobbler’s window, a man works at his bench with pliers and hammer. Another man in a cowboy hat and denim sits at a bench with a boot on one foot and a shabby sock on the other. He’s smoking a cigarette and telling the cobbler a story of how he was cheated in a business transaction. He had thought he was a buying a first-rate stallion to breed with his stable of mares, but had been swindled into buying a useless gelding named Bruno. As the cobbler finishes repairing the man’s boot, they laugh.
Every storefront presents a uniquely remarkable spectacle. There is the grocery teeming with clerks stocking shelves, and women hurriedly moving up and down the aisles, carrying baskets full of produce and slabs of meat. Next door is the bank where tellers accept deposits, cash checks, and issue loans. Just beyond that is a post office, and at the end of the street, a railway depot.
Every man, woman, and child is hard at work. Their faces are marked with determination and struggle—each minute of their days filled with purpose and intention. Not a single loafer idling away his time.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“We’re searching for the most optimal time in human existence, as regards to technology. This is the 1860s experiment. Just down the way we have a neighborhood living as if it were the 1910s. You can’t imagine how boring silent films are.”
“Any other eras?”
“We just set up a town emulating the 1950s. They even have TV.”
“Yeah, but no polio vaccination, I bet, right?”
“Everything has its pros and cons,” Karl says.
We pass the town’s limits, then cross a river, a meadow, a sand dune, and, finally, hours later, reach a large, windowless silo on a wooded hillside. The entrance is guarded by more soldiers in brown uniforms, wearing pistols on their belts. They greet Karl with ceremony—arms straight, inclined upward, hands open and palms down—reminiscent, eerily, of the Nazi salute.
Soon we’re on a high balcony, overlooking an open factory floor, where thousands of people are lined up to see one of dozens of technicians in white lab coats at curtained workstations. The floors of these workstations are bathed in a sea of blood. Next to each one of these technicians is an assistant endlessly filling a bucket of water from a latrine and pouring it on the floor.
The person nearest me is a young man the tip of whose finger has been chopped off. Blood is pouring out of it like a fountain. A woman in a white coat seizes him by the shoulder and shepherds him back toward the workstation from which he came.
“What is
this place?”
“We’re removing their grams. It’s essential to their rehabilitation.”
“But the brutality of it, Karl, it’s not necessary.”
“We’re helping the people make the connection between technology and pain. It helps if you can think of the patients not as people but as symbols—in black and white. If you can make that abstraction, based on the ideology that we know to be right, then we can do this work with impunity.”
“Was this Lydia’s idea?”
“I’m glad you asked—that was going to be my next surprise. She’s really made a name for herself here. You’ll see her tomorrow.”
49
I wake in the morning scratching at my whole body. In the dark, I knock my bedside lamp to the floor and am assaulted by the stench of kerosene. The sun pours in when I open the curtains revealing a series of brown and black stains on my sheets. They appear to be tiny drops of excrement. With a shard of the lamp’s broken glass, I cut into the mattress. Thousands of bed bugs are navigating the pathways between the mattress’s cotton filling.
There is a knock on the door, and a man barges in. He has a big, ugly face, covered in pockmarks and lumps, and is dressed formally, in the style of a western rail-splitter made famous by Abraham Lincoln. I have an appointment with Madam Lydia, he tells me, in twenty minutes, and he is here to escort me.
“Do I have time for a shower?”
“There’s no running water,” the man says. “We’re waiting to know whether that technology is deemed permissible.”
I’m taken to the center of a plaza, in front of what was once a grand hotel for visiting dignitaries and captains of industry. Its grounds are littered with hundreds upon hundreds of garbage bags, many of which have been torn open and their contents strewn about.
“Why is there so much trash everywhere?” I ask a man.
“They’ve cut the sanitation robots,” he explains. “It’s all being handled by men from now on.”
“It looks like they’ve fallen behind.”
“It’s magnificent, isn’t it? The ineffectuality of the garbage collection method creates more jobs. Now, more people can feel useful.”
At the hotel entrance two guards greet me with salutes.
“Doctor Henri, sir! It’s an honor.”
“I’m here to see Lydia,” I say.
“Of course, sir, Madam Lydia is expecting you. Right this way.”
I’m overwhelmed by the beauty and expansiveness of the hotel’s interior, with its immense stone columns, gold and silver leaf ceiling, and intricate mosaic tile floor.
“There are 128,000 hand-cut marble tiles on this floor,” the guard says. “It’s why Madam Lydia chose this location. She says it’s important to recognize the grandeur of the work that can be done by humans, without the aid of machines.”
When I move toward the elevator, the guard redirects me toward the stairway.
“The elevator isn’t running, sir.”
“Of course not,” I reply.
Every few floors I need to stop and catch my breath, and by the time I reach the top I’m winded. Bent over at the waist, huffing and puffing, my vision goes cloudy and the room begins to spin.
“Just a few days ago,” the guard says, “I was the same way. Now I’m acclimated to the climb. I’m not reliant on machines to do the work for me.”
The guard knocks on the pine doors, ten-feet-tall, to Lydia’s office.
“Send him in,” says a reedy voice.
There is my old friend Lydia sitting at the helm of the mightiest desk I’ve ever seen, the room itself reeking like a Chinese fish market. She’s dressed in a grey tunic, reminiscent of Chairman Mao. There is a gold plaque mounted on the desk’s front-side, stating that it was a gift to President Nixon from Queen Elizabeth, and that it’s made of English Oak timbers leftover from the hull of a British Arctic exploration ship. Lying on the desk is a grey cat with a docked tail, licking at its fur. Behind Lydia, on the wall, hangs an oil painting of a well-muscled slave tilling a field with a plow. The man’s face is more hardened and severe than any that’s lived in a hundred years.
“Like my desk?” Lydia inquires.
“Sure beats the bar at the Anodyne.”
“President Bradford let me remove it from the White House. He treats his people with the respect and dignity they deserve.”
Lydia fumbles with a drawer, having never fully recovered her finger dexterity. In time, she manages to pry it open and retrieves from it the mangled carcass of a tuna. Her cat meows lazily, then takes a few bites before returning to sleep.
“Periods of drastic change always require a bit of hardship and sacrifice,” Lydia says.
“Karl’s the right man for the job, then.”
“He’s good at what he does.”
“And what’s your job here, Lydia?”
Using a fork, Lydia scrapes the remainder of the tuna’s skin and bones into a waste basket. “I have a team of people who use their various methods to collect information on different individuals. If I deem that these targets pose a significant threat to society, I bring them in for further evaluation. We recently made an arrest that may be of particular interest to you.”
Lydia leads me down the stairs fast, two at a time, all the while whistling the century-old Woody Guthrie tune, “This Land is Your Land.” I struggle to keep pace, and by the time she’s reached the ground floor I’m nearly a flight behind.
“Don’t dawdle,” Lydia says. “You’re going to love this!”
When I reach her, she takes my hand and drags me into a room off the foyer. Along one wall is a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf devoid of all but one book. Lydia emits a small giggle.
“The secret door bookcase trick loses some of its magic this way, doesn’t it?”
The bookcase swings open and we find ourselves at the entrance to a pitch-black tunnel into which I must stoop because the ceiling is so low. I hear a match being struck, and then a kerosene lamp ignites. Lydia hands me the lamp and lights one for herself. After several minutes of walking, we reach a jail cell very different from the one I inhabited. Mine was made of concrete, and kept cold and sterile. This one is something out of medieval times. The walls are limestone scummy with moss, and its bars are cast from now-rotting iron. From the ceiling, water drips on the floor in pools. Lydia sets her lamp down, sending an army of cockroaches and centipedes scattering.
“Who’s there?” asks a voice from the dark.
“I’ve brought you a visitor,” Lydia says.
I raise my lamp to see who it is but hear only the sound of stiletto shoes on the rocky floor.
“Is that you, Henri?”
“Serena!” I exclaim as I stumble back in shock.
Serena stands tall and defiant in an all-white, low-cut pants suit and matching white scarf. There’s not a wrinkle or smudge of dirt on her. Every hair on her head is perfectly placed. Her eye makeup and lipstick are immaculate.
“These invalids kidnapped me in the middle of my date with a French sheikh.”
“I’ll give you old friends a few minutes to catch up,” Lydia says with imperturbable merriment.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine,” Serena replies, bowing her head uncharacteristically. “I owe you an apology.”
“It’s not your fault my life went to shambles.”
“I shouldn’t have fucked Taylor. That was wrong of me.”
“Have they told you their plans?”
“My lawyers are working to get me out.”
“President Bradford doesn’t strike me as the type to adhere to any sort of formal legal proceedings.”
“What do you suggest, then?”
“Lie to them. Tell them you’re sorry. Tell them you’re a sinner who’s lived her life terribly. Tell them you’ve had an epiphany and seen the error in your ways.”
“I would never tell those cretins such things, not even to spare my life.”
“It might come down to that.�
�
Lydia’s light grows brighter as she returns.
“Time to say good-bye,” she says.
Serena and I exchange quick glances before we leave her again to the dark.
50
I wake up on a couch, covered with a heavy wool blanket. A nurse is feeding me ice chips and wiping my brow. The room is steeped in token symbols of patriotism—American flags, a taxidermized eagle, a painting of the Statue of Liberty. In my panic I kick the blanket away and see I’m naked.
“You passed out climbing the stairs to Madam Lydia’s office.”
“Impossible!” I place two fingers to my neck and take my pulse. Eighty-six beats per minute—certainly not the heart of an elite athlete, but hardly a candidate for respiratory failure. “Bring me my clothes. I must see Lydia at once.”
As I dress, I spew a barrage of profanity. In the span of two minutes, I’ve slandered Lydia, Serena, Karl, Rachel, Taylor, and everyone in the Bradford administration. The nurse rolls up with a wheelchair, which I dismiss as I totter out the door to a sign in the stairwell that reads, “4th Floor.”
Step by step, I make my ascent, but am reduced in short order to crawling on hands and knees, the nurse my constant shadow. No longer will I acquiesce to this madness. Locking up Captains of Industry, burning books, decommissioning planes, no running water, letting the garbage pile up in the streets, shutting down the elevators—this is madness, and it must be stopped! At the eighth floor, I struggle to my feet and throw open the doors to Lydia’s office. She’s sitting at her glorious desk, eating a banana.
“This has gone far enough!” I say. “The game is over!”
“Whatever are you talking about?”
“You have Serena in prison like she’s some sort of criminal. Tell me, what laws has she broken?”
“That she hasn’t broken any is a clear indication that the laws are bad. Meantime, please don’t try to convince me she’s done nothing wrong. It insults us both. If someone were to tally up the number of people Serena has wronged, it would be in the millions. Yourself included, mind. If it weren’t for her Human Life Valuation Tool, you’d still have a job.”
The Absolved Page 20