What Goes On In The Walls At Night: Thirteen tales of disgust and delight

by Andrew Schrader

  “All that changed twenty-seven years ago today. Since implementing the Market Exclusion Act, we’ve lived lives of dignity, unity, and freedom. Through serving the Market, we’ve regained our true selves.

  “We are each like fingers on a hand, connected to each other by the Market. It has allowed us to grow closer, to be more human, to be more free.”

  Herman agreed. It was a moving summation. He clapped with everyone else. His smile, though, was bigger.

  The speech concluded a few minutes later. A few dozen people remained with Lorraine to pray during the tree-burning ceremony. The white oak tree for the burning sat on a truck bed behind her. It had been planted especially for this twenty-seven-year anniversary, some years ago, and was now twenty feet high.

  The rising smoke symbolized the superiority of the Market. The Market loved burnt offerings—natural burnt offerings. One of the first principles taught in Market Theory courses is that Market Growth is directly correlated to burnt offerings. There is no growing without destroying. No creation without destruction.

  It was a principle everyone could understand, even children.

  In fact, every child had his or her tree-burning badge displayed proudly at home.

  When children are seven years old, they’re taken into the fifth-growth forest outside the city. Each is given a gas can and some matches, and each burns their own tree and receives a badge. Afterwards, as a class, they watch the Market’s pricing mechanism change the value of white oak worldwide. They see how their actions cause the oak trees to rise in value.

  All are included in the economy.

  Herman moved on, stopping at a vendor to buy a J.B. Clinton–approved T-shirt with words stenciled on it: “Peace on Earth.” Its visuals incorporated a blue whale on fire, with one human hand shaking another above the flames escaping from the whale’s blowhole.

  Herman and the cashier made their verbal agreement on the price of the shirt, which was strictly regulated. It cost $87. The verbal agreement was the pronouncement of their intent to buy and sell, which the cameras above needed in order to prep the Market Forces of Intent.

  Herman and the cashier joined hands, looked to the sky, and gave the Market Prayer.

  Each person’s prayer is personal, and it would be rude to reveal it—although Homeland Security knows, and keeps them all on file. (The deeply curious could file a Freedom of Information request; they’re usually fulfilled within 75 years.)

  After the prayer, Herman and the cashier pushed the appropriate buttons, and the appropriate number of credits transferred from his device to hers.

  Next came the inputting of Expository Information about the purchase, as was required by law. Questions had to be answered. Why did the thought to buy this product strike you at this moment? Was there any childhood nostalgia involved in the decision-making process? How many similar items do you own already?

  Market Research must be precise and thorough to accurately gauge demand and to price goods in the future.

  An hour later, Herman finished his questions. He massaged his aching fingers and looked up at the dry sun that was turning from yellow to orange, and decided to finish his loop and head home for the evening.

  In the meantime, the festival had blossomed into a full-blown party. Two children chased each other through the streets, waving invisible guns. One played the human hunter; the other, some extinct animal species that had once flourished but was wiped out by the superior Market Forces.

  Men and women, some pushing strollers, others holding hands, skipped through the streets, twinkles in their eyes, most of them respecting Herman, their elder, by nodding to him as they passed.

  Herman’s leisurely stroll home was interrupted by a commotion in the grocery store. Out of the door exploded a boy of seventeen or so in the hands of federal agents, each of them holding an arm. In one hand the boy gripped a sugar cookie still in its cellophane packaging. He was red in the face, snarling and insane, dragging his feet, resisting arrest.

  Herman stopped to watch. So did a few dozen other onlookers, many with children. It was important for them to see justice served on Market Appreciation Day.

  Some of the children hid their faces. Others foamed at the mouth and bashed their knuckles together. The parents of those kids stood proudly behind them.

  Four officers in faceless masks tried to force the boy to his knees. He wouldn’t budge. One quick snap of the baton fixed that, and the boy went down.

  Then—

  Shzoom, shzoom! from up above . . .

  Eyes glanced up to watch the arrival of the drone-copter. Wind blew down on the people, kicking up dust, momentarily blinding the cameras in the brick walls. Men and women covered their faces, kept their hats on with one hand.

  The drone-copter landed in the middle of the street, and out stepped the magistrate, Judge Dinkins, clutching all 3,719 pages of the Market Exclusion Act.

  Judge Dinkins never let what he considered his bible out of sight. He held it close when he slept and when he ate. The pages were dog-eared and ragged, and also wavy and warped from being softened by shower steam (the judge couldn’t bear to part with it, even while bathing).

  Judge Dinkins whipped his cape behind his back and marched up to the boy. He put one hand on the back of the boy’s head, and used the other hand to cradle the book in his forearm. With his nimble forefinger he expertly flicked to the exact right page, all the while with his chin held high, eyes closed, murmuring a silent prayer for the young man in front of him.

  After a few preliminary questions, he said to the boy, “You’ve been caught stealing item number 4,894,587 listed in the Market Exclusion Act: a sugar snack, wrapped in plastic. It is the shared property of J.B. Clinton and the citizenry of Libertas. You’ve broken Law 8,975, Code 291b-83c.”

  He cleared his throat and looked with pride at the gathering crowd. “We all must work together to keep prices stable and the Price Discovery Mechanism working. As we learned after the Fourth Great Depression we can no longer make transactions outside the Market’s knowledge. It is too dangerous, and it retards the endless expansion of the Market. It’s been proven, if we do not band together to increase the Freedom Index indefinitely, our economy will collapse.

  “We have also seen,” he continued, making full use of the crowd for his history lesson, “how the insidious hiding of information disrupts the economy and stagnates growth. This occurs in the interpersonal realm as well as in the natural. Think what would happen if we didn’t know the exact rainfall coming next week. How could we predict future crop production and the price of food? And if we were unable to price food, you would be unable to feed yourself. So you see, all is connected and all information is invaluable to the service and longevity of the Market.”

  He wiped his brow. “By now, everyone should know to log information as seemingly innocuous as what time of day you had what type of drink. Or whether your daughter overcame a math problem she had difficulty solving. Perhaps you had tried to teach her the solution in several ways, but only until it was explained in a certain precise way was she able to understand. If the Market did not have access to what caused the breakthrough in thought, how could it be expected to update speech catalogs and help future children overcome adversity?

  “Of course, many more industries could be affected by such information. Maybe your speech patterns could one day help a doctor communicate to a diseased cell! Think of what that could do to lower healthcare costs for you and your fellows. Think of the possibilities for the limitless expansion of the Market!”

  The magistrate suddenly looked up from his book, blinking, still in a daze, sweat staining his underarms and leaking down his white collared shirt. He slammed the book shut and raised it high over his head.

  “I find the defendant guilty. If he refuses to produce wealth for us on his own, he will produce it for us on the inside.”

  The boy sniffled, looked up at Herman.

  Herman frowned and looked at the ground.

 
Then three officers shot electricity into the boy, so he’d give them no problems on the way to his long-term prison sentence. They handcuffed him, ankle-cuffed him, then chained his handcuffs to his ankle-cuffs, threw him into the back seat of the drone-copter, and zoomed into the air, over the mechanical clouds.

  Herman couldn’t watch. He stared at his feet and kicked at the concrete. Watched the loose pebbles fly into the cracks of the sidewalk and disappear—until he could no longer hear the low rumbling whir of the vehicle.

  The crowd slowly dispersed. Some people shook their heads; others distracted their overly sensitive children by waving toys in their faces and running off into the streets.

  It was back to the festival for them.

  Not so, for Herman. His eyes were moist. He didn’t know why. Something in the boy’s look, something Herman recognized. The boy had broken the law, and why Herman would feel anything like sympathy for a law-breaker who selfishly acted against the interest of his fellow citizens he couldn’t explain. Perhaps he was just getting older. Maybe he was already too old. Good thing he was retired.

  Before he realized it, he’d walked almost all the way across town, still frowning, staring at the ground, contemplating the unwanted emotion that had poked its head out like a ground squirrel on a prairie. How much time had passed he couldn’t say, but he was growing tired anyway, and he should probably get home to feed the cat.

  He turned right down Prosperity Street and more children barreled past him, nearly taking out his cane with their feet. One was waving a fake plastic gun at the other, pretending to shoot, sound effects—pow, pow!—escaping from her mouth.

  The sun had sunk almost all the way below the tall 400-apartment buildings that lined Prosperity Street, fading now into a red-orange hue. More and more of the vendors had broken down their tents, filled out the rest of their Expository Information, and said their Market Prayers. Above, the mechanical clouds and robotic birds kept watchful eyes on the vendors. The sky was full of the camera-clouds now, all of them concentrating on the information passed on by the vendors to their handheld devices, making sure no one was pocketing any extra money.

  Not that there was much risk of that happening. To become a vendor, one had to pass many Trust Tests. Plus, one needed an impeccable record of record-keeping, which was taught at age six, and which was expected to continue for the rest of one’s life.

  Record-keeping scores were graded on a scale from one to ten (ten being the highest). Scores were meticulously tracked. Those who maintained a ten score received, by default, the best jobs, since they were proven most capable of feeding the Market with timely, correct, and verifiable information. “Tens” were the most valued in society.

  Herman Shute had previously been rated a full-blooded ten.

  He’d lived his entire life being as thorough of a record-keeper as possible. He obeyed every rule laid out for him by society and by his parents, and hoped he made them proud. His wife, too, bless her soul. Even after Judith had left her body and (hopefully) floated higher than the mechanical clouds, Herman had recorded his every thought, good and bad, every purchase he made—including how the memory of making her laugh during their first picnic on Dinosaur Hill convinced him to buy a particular brand of J.B. Clinton bread the day after she passed. He’d bought it in remembrance of their first date, when they’d had a picnic and the same brand of bread had stuck to her teeth and she hadn’t noticed and he’d found it remarkably cute and realized even then that he would marry that damn woman.

  The day she died Herman told the Market all about it. And the Market responded: the value of J.B. Clinton bread went up half a percentage point the next day.

  All are included in the economy.

  Herman walked to the edge of the city, up to the street with the high walls and barbed wire fence that wrapped around them, when a voice whispered from the alley—

  “Mister!”

  A teenage girl, maybe fifteen, poked her head out of the sewer. She looked around hesitantly. “Do you have any food? We’re hungry down here.” She looked at him in desperation. Her lips were chapped; her face, dirty and swollen.

  “No, I’m sorry. No food.”

  The young girl looked dismayed. She shivered and wrapped her arms around her bare shoulders.

  Herman looked down at the shirt he’d just bought, the J.B. Clinton–approved shirt. He’d bought it for the memory of the anniversary of the Market Exclusion Act, like he had every year. All his shirts were lined up neatly in oak drawers at home. So he knew what would happen if he brought it home: it would sit in the drawer with the other shirts, something he’d probably never wear.

  Without thinking, Herman held out the shirt. The young girl crawled out of the sewer and up to him. Her arms and legs were thin as sticks, the skin glued to bone. She wore only a ratty tank top and shorts, and was certainly grateful for another layer. She smiled and took the garment.

  The next thing Herman saw was the building in front of him turning upside-down, then right side-up. Then he felt the craggy asphalt crunching against his face.

  Several faceless officers lifted him up. Two others rappelled from the buildings on either side of the alley.

  The magistrate stepped out of the shadows. “All right, Herman, we got you.”

  Herman quickly tried to explain his way out of this. After all, he had seventy-plus years of good behavior, total allegiance to the Market, nothing but—

  “Huh-huh,” said the magistrate, waving him off dismissively. “You’ve been found guilty of gifting outside of the Market. Of course, we’ve seen this coming for years. We knew you’d been getting lax with your record-keeping. You went from a ten rating to a nine to an eight, and when someone of your age starts slipping to a seven, it’s time to put them out to pasture.”

  The magistrate then read the appropriate and applicable sections from the Market Exclusion Act. By the time he was done, the sky was a ripe black and blue.

  Herman asked to be escorted away quickly so no one would see him. Soon the drone-copter disappeared, carrying him off to a mandatory prison sentence.

  The magistrate congratulated the young girl on her sting. Because of her, the Market would absorb Herman into the prison population and generate more freedom for everyone. The price of labor would rise slightly, and the cost of goods might go up. But adding another person to the prison workforce might lessen the load on the others and make everyone more free and productive. On the other hand, adding another mouth to feed could increase the debt load on everyone.

  So it might balance out. Or not. Who knows? Market Forces are mysterious things.

  One thing is for sure, though:

  All are included in the economy.

  Howlin’ Rain

  Big Bob McElwee zipped up his rifle bag, swung it over his shoulder, and took one last look around the study with its vaulted ceilings and granite fireplace mantel. He nodded at each of the stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls—the elk, the buffalo he’d shot last year in the Montana highlands, the antelope from his trip to the plains, and all the rest. He smiled a little at the prairie dog who stood upright in its fixed position, frozen in its inquisitive look, head cocked slightly, just the way Big Bob remembered it before he’d shot it in the belly.

  Gazing upon each of his animals—all two dozen, big and small, the ones he’d kept; he’d hunted hundreds of animals, after all—he remembered each kill, how he felt, where he was at the time, and so on. This was his tradition, and before he went out this time to find a wolf with a pretty pelt he could turn into moccasins, he gave each of his babies their own salute and a silent promise that he would bring back a new trophy to keep them company.

  He counted the tent poles and packed them with his tent, then stuffed his water filter and nine packs of dehydrated food into his duffel bag. And of course he’d remembered his other baby: a Remington Sendero SF II with its 26-inch barrel. He also brought plenty of ammo, and his six-inch buck knife hung on his belt.

  He drove
the clean, straight roads up Highway 3 from Fernwood in Benewah County, Idaho, the fir and pine trees creating striating shadows across which his vehicle cut. He passed the city of Santa and turned left onto Highway 6, which sent him south well into Saint Joe National Forest. Looking to the passenger seat, he expected Harry’s goofy Burt Reynolds moustache to be shining with beads of sweat that accumulated when the weather was hot. But, two months had passed since Harry’s disappearance somewhere in the forest, and nothing but memories remained in his usual seat.

  Bob frowned at this, and clutched at his right side, the memory having awakened some physical pain. In fact, the last three weeks he’d seen his fair share of increasing anxiety and discomfort: some kind of gastric distress, he’d thought. At first there were headaches—tension headaches of some kind—followed by bouts of terror during the night, where he found himself awakening from dreams he could no longer remember but whose resonance grated him. Most nights recently were sleepless. His wife Nancy, precious and caring woman that she was, also began experiencing anxiety, simply by proxy, and together they’d sit up until dawn sipping coffee and then go to their respective jobs, tired and dragging.

  Bob and Harry had met hunting, of course. Big Bob had hunted his whole life, and killed nearly every type of animal there was to hunt in Idaho—rabbits and squirrels when he was younger, then ducks and deer and elk.

  Three years ago he’d taken to hunting wolves; it was his first time at the derby. He’d found wood-folk just like him, folk who’d flown in from all over the country. The experience had redefined him as a hunter, especially after shooting a couple wolves during the event.

  He’d met Harry in the woods during the hunt, and Harry quickly became friend and mentor to the talented Big Bob. Soon after they’d made plans to hunt together, and they did, twice a year: one session at the derby, and one on their own, together, in some remote forest of their choosing.