I grew very still and looked at him.
“What I learned in Advanced Adversative is that God is a unit of utility that is X plus infinity, and if we assign proper values to human carriers of chaos, then the contagion ratio will dwindle into an appropriate margin and we will all be saved,” George went on, in that same, beautiful, bashful voice, his eyes almost transparent, his hair falling away from his radiant forehead. He stopped, frowning, and tapped on his temple with a long, pale finger. “At least I think that’s what Carver said.”
I backed away from George. I turned around and walked swiftly through the halls and back to the elevator. George moved quickly into the elevator after me. I pressed the Lobby button, and we went sliding down. I hurried through the building’s foyer, passed its guards, and moved back out the door.
I stood outside in the gloaming, breathing slowly and trying to shut down irrational thoughts. Lights had turned on from inside the building, and they shone a gold radius out onto the streets. On the road that we’d driven up on, I saw another truck labeled “D/SubD” drive toward the structure higher on the incline. A vehicle with the label “F/W” followed. I stared at a wide, black fan of smoke rising and billowing through the darkening sky. I had been tracking this murky fog ever since I’d arrived at the complex, and I now saw that it came from a farther-off building I could not yet detect from that vantage.
“Where’s that smoke coming from, George?”
“Oh, that’s from the building past the SubDs, about two miles up from here. That’s Waste,” he said. “In Building F/W.”
“F/W? I never heard of that before. What is that? It’s not a class.”
“Yes, it is, ma’am.”
“But we end the system at SubDs.”
“Carver introduced the new add-ons a while back—F for Failure, and W for Waste.”
I squinted at him, beginning to feel ill. “What’s ‘Waste’?” I asked. “Are you doing sanitation in the same building?”
“There’s a sanitation protocol initiated upon the revelation of a judicial announcement of a class-seven-level felony or above, where the unit has been tried as an adult,” George explained.
“But what’s ‘Waste’?” I repeated.
George shrugged and didn’t say anything.
My brain would not yet allow the full notion to invade my thoughts, and only the faintest, ludicrous outlines of it flickered through me. But already I could feel my hands trembling. “George, tell me what ‘Waste’ is.”
George stared at the ground, nodding to himself. “I think it’s time you were going home now, Mrs. Eager. Carver used to say that our program has too much sophisticated geometrical currency for bureaucrats like you to understand.”
I looked at the smoke again and the prisons looming above me.
“Where’s Carver?” I said in a softer, tense voice.
“Melinda thinks you’re going to get upset at Carver and shut us down, but you shouldn’t.”
The muscles in my back begin to pulse with pain. “Did he quit?”
George didn’t answer.
“Where’d he go?” I said. “I mean, he’s somewhere—he’s not dead.”
George looked at me from under his eyelashes.
“He’s—he died?”
“Carver said we could all be happy. He said that all it takes to be free is choosing to be. Once that happens, everything else becomes easy. All decisions become simple.” George cast his gaze back down. “Carver said a lot of things. He also said I was tiddleywinks and paddywhack who deserved to get my throat slit by the Nons and that he was a fucking monster who was damned.”
“What happened to him?”
“Mrs. Eager, after Carver initiated the Wastes’ sanitation sequences, he celebrated for a long time with unapproved mind substances, and then he just up and deutilitized himself. But nobody at the Academy knows it except for Melinda and me and just a few others.”
“Are you telling me he killed himself?’”
George sniffed and stared off again, in the direction of the lovely grasslands where the A/Bs played. His eyes began to brim with tears.
“He said that he realized he’d gone into the red and that he was going put himself into the black.”
I won’t go into all the details of the histrionics and confusions that followed the moments when I finally extracted a clear description of Carver’s suicide and my consequent running hither and thither for confirmation. I will say that George refused to allow me to see any other Academy facilities on account of my lack of “sophistication,” and I had not insisted. Racing about, I finally found Melinda in a state of semi-catatonia in a barracks that Academy administrators lived in. After I incentivized her, she explained that George had been correct and that Carver had died in the basement of the F/W Building from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. I thereafter lost the energy required for further investigations.
George drove me straight to my hotel. I had a long, hard phone conversation with the Secretary and then lay awake in my bed. I warded off shadowy, echoing, waking nightmares of invisible vampires and bloody-handed murderers, like my son Sheraton suffered from. At around two a.m., I’d gone digging through my duffel bags until I discovered my little plastic baggies of the vitamins and minerals my psychologist had recommended. One purple pill, one blue pill, one white pill, one yellow pill. I took them all but then spent the rest of the night frantically trying to write a coherent report, which I could not finish and abandoned at about five o’clock in the morning.
Three hours later, wearing the same sweatpants and sweatshirt that I’d sweated through all night long and still feeling groggy from my medicine, I’d caught the next flight out of the city. I landed in Dulles and didn’t even stop at home. I got my car from the airport lot and went straight to the Agency. The Secretary agreed to see me right away, and thus I quickly found myself standing once again on her eagle rug, at two p.m. the next day.
“Who’s running it now?” the Secretary asked, shaking her head.
“His assistant, I think,” I said. “A woman, Melinda Gerber.”
The Secretary briefly closed her eyes and rubbed them. “Right, that’s what you said last night. Yes. I think she came up from the A class. She’d been my contact lately. But I don’t know much about her.”
“The thing that we have to get in front of here is that Carver merged the school and the prison,” I said.
“I told you already, that’s not news to me. That was the innovation. It’s the efficient consolidation of the for-profits. And it’s not just the prisons. They have a juvenile court installed there and a migrant quarantine too. All of it’s legal.”
“I think, madam,” I said slowly, “that there have been excesses.”
The Secretary looked at her computer and blew out a breath. “We’ll look into it.”
I rasped out a cough. “I think there have been—”
“It’s sad about Carver,” the Secretary said in a brisk tone. “In situations like this, when employees lose colleagues in a work-related tragedy, we often recommend counseling.”
I pressed my hands on my exhausted eyes. “Are you going to shut it down?”
“Of course not. But we’ll send in inspectors and deal with any violations, and hopefully there won’t be any problems with consent decrees.” She tapped her nails on the desk. “Though I don’t remember the last time I heard of one being issued.”
I peered at her, looking for any signs of anxiety or loathing. But I couldn’t see any. I nodded.
“Petra, this is just the shock of seeing the sausage factory,” the Secretary said. “Most of the time you’re parked at a desk. But nothing’s changed. We run good programs, and when mistakes get made, we go in and fix them. Like we always have.” She cleared her throat. “And, after all, it’s your work that helped build these marvelous schools. Carver was the idea man, but you implemented. The mergers, the installation of the judiciary, the licenses for the protocols . . .”
I st
ared at the eagle on the carpet. “But I didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Oh, as soon as he asked for Sensitive Class, we all knew, sugar,” the Secretary said, tidying some papers on the desk. “Petra, get yourself together. This is the job. This is the work that you signed on for and that you are so good at.” She raised her eyes again and watched me carefully for my response.
“Yes,” I finally said.
“You’re overreacting.”
“I see, yes.”
“Go home and go to sleep,” she said.
For a brief second, I felt my legs start to give and thought I was going to faint from exhaustion, vitamins, and the rest. But I didn’t.
“All right,” I said.
Joseph P. Overton came up with the idea of the Overton Window in the mid-1990s, in a series of articles that he wrote at the Mackinac Center, on Mackinac Island, Michigan. The theory draws from public choice economics, which seek to foster maximal liberty within the nourishments offered by the free market and functional democracy. Overton recognized that some of the ideas that grew out of public choice doctrine—like charter schools and vouchers—were too radical for many people to accept before the turn of the century, and so he thought about ways to expand “the window” to open people’s receptivity to new ideas, solutions, and principles.
Each of us has an Overton Window, though we usually don’t call it that. We feel it opening and closing within our minds, like a physical portal, which can be flung wide open to the universe or slammed shut. Sometimes we call our Overton Window “heartstrings,” and sometimes we call it the “still small voice.” Or we can call it “conscience” or “common sense” or “grace” or “morality.”
What I’m saying, and what I’ve said before, is that some ideas are just plain repulsive when you first consider them. But the longer you hear blasphemies spoken aloud by your betters and the courts, the more you’re able to regard them as possible options that are well within the Window. Still, to truly start seeing these concepts as real solutions, as inevitable conclusions, you might need a visionary to help shepherd you along. You can look to their light for guidance. Carver, in his insanity and his zeal, had once been that light bearer.
I didn’t drive home and go to sleep, like the Secretary had counseled. Instead, after I left her office, I spent the rest of that work day laboring furiously in my office, writing intricate lists and drawing graphs as I tried to make sense of Carver’s moral math. These calculations did not prevent me from having an attack of the shakes, like the ones I’d weathered back in the late ’20s, when the Secretary had asked me to bar the gay and Non kids from the charters. This one was stronger. Eventually, I called my psychologist, and she ordered me a better prescription. I ran to the pharmacist closest to the Agency and got the pills straight off.
By the evening, I felt calmer. I washed myself in the sink in the Agency’s women’s bathroom, dunking my head under the faucet and splashing my armpits and between my legs. I could smell the stink on me, but I scrubbed hard and washed it away. Finally, around seven p.m. I was all right to go home.
I opened our house’s front door. I entered our foyer. I proceeded to the dining room. I was a little late for the evening meal. At our table, I saw James, Sheraton, Tina, and Ulrike eating a dinner of broiled chicken, green beans, salad, and potatoes. They all looked up at me with sparkling eyes, excited. Sheraton jumped up from his seat and ran over to hug me.
“Mom!”
“Hey there, hon,” James said. He stood up, laughing because I was back home. I could see the funny, frustrated love that he felt for me in the way he waggled his head, like to say, “Well, you’re finally back.” Ulrike and Tina also clattered up to me, tugging on my sleeves and yelling for my attention. And Sheraton wouldn’t let go of me.
“How’d it go?” James asked, taking my bag and pressing his mouth to mine in a quick, dry kiss.
“How’d it go?” I looked down and stroked Sheraton’s daisy-bright hair.
“Yeah, your trip. You had that meeting with Carver, right?”
Sheraton still gripped onto my legs and waist, holding me tight, tight, tight. I crouched down and enveloped him in a big bear hug. “Hey you, hey you,” I sang to him.
“Hey you,” he sang back, whispering it in my ear. “Hey you.”
I closed my eyes and buried my face in the crown of his head, which had been so soft and terrifyingly delicate when he’d been an infant. I breathed in all of that purity of him, in and out, and in and out again. And the most beautiful memory flitted through my mind right at that moment. I thought of the day that I gave birth to Sheraton, twelve years before. I saw him red, bloody, screaming, and wriggling, when he’d broken free of the breech and the cord. My firstborn. My first baby. My perfect baby. And that tenderness blossomed inside me and branched out into the love I felt so strongly for all of my beautiful, innocent children and my dear husband.
I may have carved out a window in my soul big enough to fit the devil, but that doesn’t mean that I will ever let my family know the filth I’m involved in.
“The trip went fine, sweetheart,” I said to James, standing up and nudging the kids back to the table like nothing was wrong. “It was good. Let’s eat.”*
The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could
“WELL, THAT WAS DARK,” Ellen said.
“It was based on Heart of Darkness,” I said, holding a paperback of Conrad’s novella and flapping it at her and Tamar.
“Still, what the hell,” Ellen said. Ellen’s sixty-five, is divorced from her wife, has blond hair and blue eyes, and wears a lot of necklaces. She’s a white, Jewish woman who used to be a pharmacist but then retired and now is a volunteer tutor, like me. She looked at Tamar and then back at me. “A little intense for kids, don’t you think?”
“Was it?” I asked Tamar. “You guys read Hunger Games and books about vampires.”
“It was fine,” Tamar said. “And I’m not a kid anymore.”
“You know all that crap’s not going to happen, right?” Ellen asked me.
“No,” I said. “Not today.” My name’s Sandra, and I’m fifty-one. I have black-silver hair and brown eyes and wear big Land’s End dresses and Allbirds without socks. I’m a single, bisexual, Latina law professor / fiction writer / tutor and was all fucked up because for the past week I’d been researching Betsy DeVos, overcrowded immigrant camps in Clint, Texas, the prison industrial complex, and the manifesto of the El Paso shooter all at the same time. Actually, I don’t know if it was research exactly. It was more just staring blankly at the news and feeling like I was having a heart attack.
“I liked it,” Tamar said. Tamar’s eighteen years old and black. Her mother and stepfather kicked her out of her house for being queer two years ago. She has enormous brown eyes and a small silver piercing in her nose. She wears clothes like jeans and Nike T-shirts. She listens to dissonant music on some kind of new iPod contraption that involves having little white pipes stick out of your ears and seems Star Trek to me. She wants to be a veterinarian after graduating from a four-year and the UC Davis vet program. She reads a lot, though, and her comments on the books we study together are always deep and thoughtful, and so secretly I’m hoping that she’ll become a writer.
Still, I started feeling freaked out because maybe I shouldn’t have told her the story I’d feverishly written on my computer last night, because she was too young and living in a shelter. “Did you really think it was good?”
Tamar shrugged. “I mean, sort of. Sure. Yeah.”
“I was inspired by your assignment,” I said.
“You’re such a weirdo,” Tamar said, laughing.
“I know,” I said.
Ellen, Tamar, and I sat in the group house’s dining-room area, which doubled as tutorial spaces. This was on Vermont Street, in LA. Ellen and I worked as tutors for the Los Angeles Children’s Network (LACN), an LGBTQIA youth homeless shelter in South LA. The group home was an old Craftsman decorated with soft, a
ncient sofas and easy chairs. In the TV room, toward the front of the house, there was a big TV, where about five kids right now were watching Castle. The show’s theme song drifted over to us: Ta deee ta dooo ta deeee. The kids had covered the walls of every single room in the house with homemade self-portraits (collage; splashy watercolors) and colorful posters announcing that we were in a “safe space” and “queer is love.” A big table, covered with a daisy-patterned plastic tablecloth, occupied the center of the dining room. We’d cluttered the table with paper, pencils, and an old Penguin binding of Conrad’s famous story, because Tamar had to write a paper on the book for her City College English class. Actually, the paper was due last week, but she had to get an extension because she’d been working overtime at HealthGreen, which is a health-food restaurant here in LA that is insufficiently supportive of its employees’ educational needs. Tamar was eighteen, but LACN still lets you live in the shelter up to the age of nineteen.
“How’s your meditation practice?” Ellen asked me. She was waiting for Sasha, her three o’clock, and hanging out while we supposedly worked on Tamar’s paper.
“Really good,” I said, in a voice that said, Are you joking?
“You can’t give up,” Ellen said, cracking her neck and sighing.
“I’m just on hiatus,” I said, in a voice that said, I’m sick of meditating, and I’m never going to do it again.
“I’m not just talking about the meditation,” she said. “It’s not Kristallnacht; it’s still a democracy here.”
“What about what went down in Clint? What about what just happened in El Paso?”
Ellen pointed her chin at Tamar. “It’s bad, but people like you, me, and her are going to fix it.”
“How?” I asked. “How?”
“I don’t know, vote Biden in 2020.”
“Biden smells women’s hair,” I said.
“I’m just saying, don’t throw in the towel.”
I rubbed my face. “Everything just feels very Heart of Darknessy right now.”
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