Adjustment Day

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The cards were slippery, thin sheets of stiff plastic. Each showed the face of a man, like somebody’s dad on television, a handsome face like an actor would have on a television commercial selling gold coins. Nick accepted the cards and fanned them to count how many. They were the new money he’d heard about. Nobody had any, not unless they worked for one of the vigilantes. Dropping to one knee, he stashed the cards in the top of his sock. Some he stuffed in his pockets. Plenty of hungry people around these days, it didn’t pay to take chances.

  Jamal nodded at the dog. “Bouncer and I are boarding a plane in a few days, headed for a new life.” He meant in Blacktopia, the nation partitioned exclusively for anyone with a preponderance of sub-Saharan DNA. He said, “It’s been an interesting experiment, but it’s over.”

  He was referring to black people and white people living together, the whole united states thing, Nick figured.

  Jamal asked, “In school, you ever read that Grapes of Wrath book?” He shook his head in disgust. “Those people running all over. Saying they need to strike back to fix the system. But they never do anything, just dig ditches for a nickel and give birth to dead babies.” He spat on the ground. “That book’s bullshit.”

  Nick kept one hand tucked in his pocket, touching his windfall. “Yeah, we read it.”

  Jamal asked, “What do you suppose was the sense of reading about those useless people?” He turned to address the dog, asking, “You ever wonder what that book was really teaching us?” To Nick he offered the blue-black book in his hand. “Talbott says it’s okay to kill yourself with drugs. But he says there’s no greater high to be gotten than killing your oppressors.” A big diamond glinted in one of his earlobes.

  Nick asked, “Did you kill Brolly?”

  Jamal asked, “You ever hear of the Peabody Plantation?” He turned and spoke to the dog. “We own it. Don’t we, Bouncer? One entire valley of forests and farmland, and an impressive Greek Revival mansion set down in the center of it.”

  Nick guessed this was in some former state, what used to be Georgia or North Carolina. “You have people used to be slaves there?” He didn’t mean anything harsh. Such a nowhere house just seemed like an odd choice for a one-time druggie. It was tough to imagine Jamal as a farmer.

  Jamal dug in his pocket and offered up another handful of the money cards. “Take it. I can’t spend it before it all expires.” He offered the book and the new money in the same hand like a package deal. “It’s the law. You’ll get arrested for not carrying this book.”

  Nick took them both. Here was somebody, one among the many he’d never see again.

  “Come on, dog,” Jamal said. He tugged the leash and the pit followed. The two walked away.

  Cash in hand, Nick sprinted in heart-racing, sweaty strides in the opposite direction. To score a mountain of Oxy or hydro and get so fluffed the state of the world wouldn’t matter. To catch the talky kid before he sold his stash to someone else.

  To Jamal, Adjustment Day was doing the opposite of that Grapes of Wrath book. The book people had to read for seventh-grade English. Where white people are bullied off their farm. A tractor runs over their house, and they do nothing. A loan officer or some such comes and tells them to move on, and this family does nothing. Yeah, they talk about getting guns and storming the bank to kill the bankers, but they never do it.

  Instead this white family hauls ass to California where they get dumped on by the police and worked to death for small change. But they still do nothing. They keep talking about one day. Talking about taking up arms in some revolution against the rich man, and all along they do nothing except let their old folks die and get buried in unmarked graves. They let their kids starve. For hundreds of pages Jamal kept reading, expecting the revolution, and in the end it’s just a dead baby dumped into a creek and some old dying old man getting to suck on some young girl’s titty. The author, John Steinbeck, had been a pussy, too afraid to make anything happen. He’d abandoned his characters to suffer.

  As had God.

  Only a white man had the inflated self-worth to write that book, and only a white man would have the secret pride to read it.

  It’s only the white man who clings to his guilt. Guilt for Adam’s fall. Guilt for Christ’s sacrifice and for black African slavery. It was clear to Jamal that for whites their guilt constituted a uniquely white form of boasting. Their breast beating was a humblebrag always saying: We did this! We thwarted God in the Garden! We killed his son! We white people will do with other races and natural resources as we see fit!

  Showing off disguised as a mea culpa.

  For the white man, his guilt was his biggest badge of accomplishment. Only whites killed the planet with global warming so only whites could save it. Their boasting never let up.

  It was the white racket: Creating problems so they could rescue everybody.

  And while school forced kids to read that pathetic Grapes book . . . kids volunteered to read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Kids yearned to be Howard Roark on the witness stand. Schools despised the fact that genius only touches a few men. Geniuses recognize the school teachers’ mediocre campaign to teach mediocrity to the mediocre. And kids reject the idea of lifelong suffering and failure.

  In The Fountainhead, somebody does what Steinbeck only talks about. That’s why kids love Rand’s book.

  How Jamal saw Adjustment Day, it amounted to the happy ending that Grapes book failed to deliver.

  And today, Jamal and three of his cohorts returned to the state house, victorious.

  That’s not to say Jamal didn’t feel conflicted.

  People ask what it felt like. Adjustment Day, that is. He told them that what he’d done felt like walking into the world’s skuzziest bus station. Like walking into a stinking world of vomit-coated concrete floors and face-down winos. Like wading through this stink to find the Men’s Room, a shithole of dripping pipes and backed-up drains. Sidestepping the puddles to get to a toilet, then sitting bare-assed on the still-warm, gooey toilet seat, breathing air that’s nothing but accumulated farts. And then looking down and spotting something on the floor.

  Like looking over, and there next to the filth-streaked toilet bowl, stuck to the crap-dappled, sperm-sprinkled concrete floor, there’s an almost-pristine-looking 800 milligram Oxycontin.

  To help, you tell yourself it’s medicine. And by its very nature medicine kills germs. Somewhere some doctor had prescribed it. A scientist in a laboratory had made it, even if it’s spotted with overspray from a bunch of diseased bus station perverts.

  All that needs doing is to bend over and pry that pill off the floor. Only that one, quick, nasty job. Just pop that pill in your mouth and swallow it and everything will be all right. Better than all right, everything will be perfect. Like a perfection you can’t even imagine.

  That’s how Adjustment Day occurred for Jamal in retrospect. And here he was returning to the scene of his . . . not crime, but triumph. In the statehouse, the janitors had scrubbed away the blood because they could imagine no other option. Somewhere the widows wept, but the dead were not Jamal’s dead. The widows counted as nothing, not compared to the widows and mothers who’d be wailing if the war had been declared and his entire generation had been shipped to some bureaucrat-organized, offshore mass execution.

  A man representing his lineage stood at the front of the great room. Everyone carried a copy of the blue-black book, and everyone smiled. It wasn’t the law, but holding a copy of the book, everywhere public, all the time, was motivated by something more frightening than the law.

  The bullet holes in the paintings couldn’t be helped. Nor could the divots where ricochets had bounced off the marble columns and panels. Details that future tourists would marvel over and photograph. The few remaining senators scurried around the place, doing everyone’s bidding. Those old men looked gaunt, eaten away on a cellular level. One man had a scar notched at the top of his ear. He approached, bowing and scraping, and placed a dossier on Jamal’s desk, t
hen backed away, still bowing.

  The man at the lectern leaned into a microphone and announced, “Our first order of business . . .” The warmth of television cameras bathed them.

  As directed, Jamal stood and held the Talbott book open in both hands and began to read aloud, “Act One, Article One of the Declaration of Interdependence . . .”

  A hush fell over the room as he continued. Jamal risked a glance upward and searched among the faces in the spectators’ balcony. Time stretched into forever. The silence waited. He searched among the faces for a particular woman. The waiting, watching faces. And there, standing where he’d stood on Adjustment Day, there the woman stood so high above him.

  Only then did Jamal return to the book and resume reading, “All persons compelled to surrender real property and to relocate to an appropriate homeland must be compensated with an amount of property equal to or greater than that relinquished . . .”

  Her smile beamed down upon him. Her eyes so proud, there stood his mother.

  People had seen the new money on television: slightly stiff-feeling slips of plastic, too rigid to fold. The colors: vivid combinations of red-and-blue or yellow-and-violet. Officially, the order called them Talbotts, but everyone knew them as skins. Rumor was the first batches were refined from, somehow crafted from the stretched and bleached skin taken from targeted persons. People seemed to take a hysterical joy from the idea.

  Instead of being backed by gold or the full faith of government or some such, this money was backed by death. The suggestion was always that failure to accept the new currency and honor its face value might result in the rejecter being targeted. Never was this stated, not overtly, but the message was always on television and billboards: Please Report Anyone Failing to Honor the Talbott. The bills held their face value for as long as a season, but faded faster in strong light and fastest in sunlight. A faded bill held less value as the markers along the edges became illegible. But even when the skin had faded to a slip of white-ish, slightly opaque plastic, not unlike a bleached and dried rectangle of parchment or lambskin, fueling the rumors each was a souvenir scalped from a television newscaster or college professor, even when the skins were anonymous white-ish cards, they still held a slight value. These faded blanks—most referred to them as blanks—could still be returned to the government for a small refund. Children collected them from trash bins, or the homeless gathered them from the gutter like aluminum cans and glass bottles for recycling. A hundred blanks were worth a five-Talbott note, thus they were the equivalent of an old-order nickel. Incentive sufficient to keep children recovering them.

  The lineages that for so long had sunk themselves, deeper and deeper, man by man, like tap roots into society, they’d come to form long chains that permeated across all social groups. Now these channels of men were used to suffuse the new society with its currency.

  The man above him, Garret Dawson, gave Charlie a cardboard box containing one hundred thousand Talbotts and told him to spend what he could and pass the balance to the man below him along with the same orders. Charlie bought a necktie and planned to keep the rest of the money, but the next day Garret came to him with another box, and a third on the third day. All along the Talbotts were fading infinitesimally, and Charlie was forced by good sense to begin passing them along to the next man who spent what he could and passed the balance to the next. In this way the money flowed down the length of each lineage, making those men wealthy beyond their dreams and making the people who knew them wealthy and the people who knew those people rich and those who knew those rich people became well off, and in this way the new economy began to float and stabilize itself.

  The new money cascaded down. It bucketed from man to man.

  Because the money could not be hoarded many tried to trade it for gold and diamonds, but those who held the gold and diamonds refused to sell, and thus gold and diamonds fell out of circulation and lost all value. They became like masterpiece paintings, items traded among the rich as signs of status, but they meant nothing to the majority of people. As the largest fortunes of the old times lost their wealth, because they could not use money to make money, and knew no other way to survive, their possessions came to the market.

  Oh, and the women. They left Charlie breathless, the women who migrated to him in droves, young women, older women presenting their daughters, women who understood the value of their beauty and vitality in this market. To them Charlie, skinny Charlie, ridiculous Charlie who’d hardly finished high school and could only operate a drill press, these women who’d only ever snubbed him—that is, if they’d even realized he was alive—these days they fought among themselves merely to catch his eye.

  Mondays and Tuesdays Charlie sat in a chair at the head of a table littered with photographs. The table had belonged to a medieval king, and the chair to a Renaissance count or whatnot, the names of neither Charlie could remember. Not that it mattered. Now the table and chair and the suits of armor clutching lances that lined the hallways and the flags that fluttered atop the turrets, they belonged to Charlie. A fire blazed, continually replenished with logs carried in by men on Charlie’s payroll. While other men fanned him with peacock feathers, and others presented braised peacock tongues and peeled grapes, neither of which Charlie could bring himself to eat, and even with the expenses involved in the upkeep of such a household Charlie could not spend the new money as fast as the lineage required. Most of it passed on to the next man and the men beyond him.

  Mondays and Tuesdays an agent in his employ brought a selection of women who’d been chosen, handpicked from the throngs who’d submitted detailed applications. Women with movie-star faces and porn-movie bodies, they sat in the outer rooms and assessed one another, and the agent escorted each, woman by woman, to the receiving hall where Charlie more or less held court.

  Most Charlie dismissed with a glance and a polite “Thank you.” Some he’d invite to come closer. Of the women some brought business propositions. Some wanted to be appointed to a position in the new government. Whatever the case, Charlie considered them all with the same intent.

  Within a season the old order subsided. The new lineages became the knights crowned, dukes and lords who held their rewards by a single successful battle, and those who were family to them benefited, and those who learned to be of service to those fresh noble families, housed in ancient estates recently acquired, those who served them best, with labor, with food, with entertainment, they were the next most prosperous. And lastly, the persons who could offer no skill except their prowess at manipulating the old currency, restricting its flow and dolling it out for fees, that class of persons with their outdated field of expertise, they were left to wander in the street seeking out the blanks that they carried by the dirty paper sack-load, like once ears had been carried, to the counting stations.

  Regardless of how the skins arrive at the counting houses, there they are cleaned, fitted under a stencil, and re-exposed to the ultraviolet light. Revitalized for another three months, these Talbotts reenter circulation at the top of the lineage chains.

  People accepted the new currency with all its flaws because there was no other option. As stated in the blue-black book:

  First make yourself despicable, then indispensable.

  The replacement economy was like a balloon being filled with water from a spigot. As more money poured into it, the balloon swelled and hung heavier, but until it was filled no one could say how large it would grow or what shape it would ultimately assume.

  If anyone asked Miss Josephine Peabody, the lost politicians were show-offs, showboating snake-oil fakirs whose summary executions they had coming. Good riddance and God bless. Rest in peace. No, the natural order, if one followed the classic models of beauty and governance, held that property owners alone should determine what was best for people, for only the owners had the proper vested interest. Planters in particular in the agrarian tradition of Jefferson, without the corrupting influence of the Jew and to a lesser extent the Catholic
interests.

  If anyone asked, that is, but no one had. No, it took Arabella coming up from the kitchen one morning to suggest Miss Josephine turn on the idiot box on account of the same man appearing on every channel. A loathsome habit, watching television before supper, but Arabella insisted, standing by Miss Josephine’s chair while this man announced:

  A house is not a homeland. This calls for the partitioning of the formerly united states in order to provide separate, distinct autonomous nations wherein each people can conduct their lives. It is wrong for one culture to impose itself upon another either by actions or expectations. Therefore each must exist free of the demands placed on it by the other.

  Miss Josephine pointed the remote control like a scepter, to banish the man, but his image and pontificating persisted:

  Each group must inhabit a homeland where that group constitutes the norm. Otherwise either self-destroying, self-hatred, or other-attacking self-aggrandizing occurs. Drinking, drugs, and toxic sexual behaviors arise when cultures are compelled to share public space. No culture should be held to the expectations and subjected to the withering gaze of another.

  Arabella wore her apron and twisted a dish towel between her hands. She asked, “What’s it mean?” It didn’t signify, Miss Josephine assured her and sent her back to shelling peas. Arabella didn’t appear convinced, and left the room slow as molasses, walking backward so she could keep her eyes on the screen. There the man was speechifying:

  Just as the genders are separated in most athletic competitions so should the cultures be removed each from the others so that one culture might not always dominate.

  The unhappy result of which being that Arabella’s man, Lewis, felt it his duty to show himself into her sitting room doorway where he approached no closer than the threshold and tried to claim that Georgia was no longer a state of these United States, but had been given over along with Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama to create some sort of Martin Luther Kingdom designated to be inhabited by only blacks, and at this Miss Josephine wheeled herself to the door and shut it in his face.