by Jonathan Dee
“How about you?” she said instead. “Any place you need to be this morning?”
He seemed stung by the question, though she hadn’t meant anything by it. “Well, I have to figure out what to do about this one tenant, in a house down in Egremont, who’s doing his best to make my life miserable,” he said. “He called me the other night at eight fifteen because he wants me to repaint his kid’s bedroom. His kid says he can’t sleep because he doesn’t like the color.”
“So why doesn’t he just paint it himself?”
“Well, actually he can’t, because it says in his lease he’s not allowed to. I got so sick of him that I gave him Barrett Taylor’s number, but he won’t use it, he insists on calling me even for the most routine thing.”
“Barrett Taylor? The same Barrett Taylor?”
“Yeah, remember him? He’s kind of like my super now. Anyway, it drives Karen a little crazy that the guy calls all the time, and so I’m trying to come up with some way to just evict him without having to spend all my time in court. I’ve had it. You can just never do enough for this guy.”
“Well,” said Candace, “maybe you aren’t.”
“Maybe I aren’t what?”
“Doing enough.”
Mark colored. “You don’t get it,” he said. “The problem is that whatever you do, as soon as it’s taken care of he’s immediately on you about the next thing. There’s no end to it.”
“He’s got a son, you said?”
“Two sons, actually.”
“And the first one, the one who can’t sleep, what’s his problem exactly?”
Mark sat back and crossed his arms. He could see where this was going. “I don’t know what his problem is,” he said, “because his problem is not my problem.”
“Ah.” She tried to tilt another drop out of the coffee cup she’d already drained a minute ago. “Well, you know what they say, with great worth on paper comes great responsibility.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s talk about something else, then,” she said calmly. “Been out to see Mom and Dad lately?”
“Is this why you asked me out for breakfast,” he said, “to try to make me feel guilty?”
“Kind of, yeah,” she said.
In the silence between them the ambient sounds of the coffee shop asserted themselves: the hoarse gargle of milk being steamed, the dim mumble of insular one-on-one conversation, and the music, just audible, aggressively obscure and unlovely and never not playing.
“They aren’t doing that badly,” Mark said. “That’s in your head.”
“They aren’t taking care of themselves. You don’t see it because you don’t want to see it. You live in that huge house with all those empty rooms—you should take them in.”
“No. Are you kidding? No! Karen’s head would explode, for one thing. And they’d never agree to it anyway. And to be honest I wouldn’t want that kind of negativity around Haley every day.”
“Well, I’m not taking them. And Gerry’s not taking them. And you know they’re not moving to Colorado. And they don’t have any money. So if you’re not thinking about where that’s going, it can only be because you’re trying not to think about it.”
“Keep your voice down, please,” Mark said.
“You used to talk so much about family,” she said. “It used to make me kind of sick, to be honest. But it was all just bullshit, I guess.”
“You know what, I’ve got to run,” Mark said.
“Me too. I have to make an Autumn Leaf display. I’ll let you pay for the coffee.” She drained her cup a third time and stood and left. The bell on the door tinkled behind her.
He drove home with his lips moving angrily, pleased that he’d find his house empty at that hour. He’d dared to do the one thing that none of them could bear, which was to succeed. In Howland he stopped on Main Street just to pick up the paper. He was getting back into his car when something caught his eye, some slight change in the backdrop so dimly but deeply imprinted on his sense memory, a streak of white. He looked up, at the corner of the old Holbeck mill. Someone had climbed up there—it couldn’t have been easy—and painted the word CAMERA, with a helpful directional arrow pointed at the spot where the surveillance camera was bracketed onto the cornice.
BIG BROTHER COMES TO HOWLAND—
POSTED 10/1/2006 AT 1:04 A.M.
Citizens, if there’s one thing that history has taught us, it’s that the more we’re told to look across borders, across oceans for our enemies, the easier prey we are for the enemies within, the enemies right under our nose.
Did anybody notice that at some point—I’m not sure when, could have happened any time, because we weren’t told about it, much less asked for our approval—the Benevolent Billionaire who rules us has put up surveillance cameras over our heads in town? Well, yes, somebody apparently noticed, because there was some protest graffiti up there for a day or two. One word—literally one word of protest—but of course that was too much for them, and the power-washers were up there practically the next day.
The cameras themselves aren’t gone, though, of course. Two that I know of, probably more. (Why not a hundred more, if that’s what he wants? He can afford it.) They’re at either end of Main Street. They’re not hard to spot if you just have the mindset to look for them.
So look for them. And then ask yourself why they’re there. At whose behest? To look at what? Where is the information collected by these devices, information about you, being stored, and for what purpose? If you can even get anybody at Town Hall to answer these questions, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks I can predict their answer:
“Security!”
People, don’t you get it? This is what we’ve been hearing for years now, while they chip away at our rights: Security! Our enemies are coming for us! You have to do what we tell you, you have to give up whatever autonomy, whatever constitutional protections, we tell you to give up! Because: security!
Meanwhile, your real enemy is the one who claims he alone can protect you. He’s right beside you. Maybe in the next booth at the diner…
It was easier to ignore the whole invasion of your personal privacy when it existed mostly on TV. Or on your computer. I mean, we know our emails are being read, but it still seems too abstract to be real, it’s happening in some place we can’t see and probably can’t even imagine.
But now it’s come home, folks. It’s on Main Street. Not some abstract “Main Street USA,” but Main Street right here in Howland. Next time you’re buying a quart of milk, or a six-pack, or a book or a magazine, remember that you’re being looked at—recorded—and think about why you let that happen.
I am so tired of the whole narrative about how billionaires are so morally pure, how they can’t be bought! First there was Ross Perot, then Bloomberg in New York…The rich are incorruptible, because the rich don’t care about money! Have you ever heard anything more Orwellian in your entire life? No one, people, is more of a slave to money, and to moneyed interests, than a billionaire. And there’s no power trip like using your money to buy people. “What’s his motive?” his defenders will say. “What would he have to gain? We can’t make him any richer than he already is.” The altruistic billionaire! You answer your own question about what he has to gain when you defend him like that, because YOU are what he has to gain. Power is its own end. And what’s a billion bucks on paper compared to the thrill of owning a place, a town, a citizenry? It’s all about control. The cameras seal the deal. He won’t be happy until Howland is a kingdom.
Are you willing to be his subjects?
There are rumors, too, of a curfew in town (favorite tool of dictators everywhere: the curfew!), of a ban on smoking, not just in Town Hall but everywhere, in restaurants, in bars, in your own homes. Think I’m kidding? When it happens, remember that I warned you and you blew it off.
Or: Show me that you’re out there. That you hear me. That you’re alive, and not willing to roll over for those who would cons
olidate their own power by taking everything from you. And I do mean everything.
Show me you haven’t given up!
Rally to Demand the Immediate Removal of the
Howland Government Surveillance System
WEDNESDAY, OCT. 11, 5 P.M.
MAIN STREET, HOWLAND, MA
Some will call this an overreaction. What’s a couple of cameras, they’ll say? It deters crime! Two things: one, “security” is always the false flag under which the powerful expand their reach into your lives; two, why wait until the Dear Leader’s security apparatus is even stronger, more extensive, more deeply embedded? Why not let him know now that this is unacceptable, that we’re still Americans?
Because let’s not forget that we live in Massachusetts, which is the proud cradle of American freedom from tyranny. Not revolution, despite the name attached to that war, but simple refusal—refusal to let a small, powerful class enrich itself by stripping the common man of his rights, his freedoms, chief among which is the inalienable, God-given right to be left the fuck alone. What business of yours is my business? That is the principle upon which the country was established, and if that principle is taken away, what reason is there for this country to exist anymore?
WEDNESDAY, OCT. 11, 5 P.M., MAIN STREET
Be there. Show the world your number! Stand up and be counted! It may be that your humble correspondent will be there as well, walking among you!
—PC Barnum
As had happened on just one or two other occasions, he was actually crying a little bit by the time he hit the Post button. He rarely edited or even reread what he’d composed. It was private and public at the same time. It was like imagining yourself a famous person, an immortal, keeping a diary: the diary was private but also for posterity—you knew it would live outside of you even if you couldn’t see exactly how. The internet was like posterity moved up to your time frame. Like going to your own funeral. You took your passion, stripped it of any kind of social inhibition, and launched it into the dark, populated void. There was a little hit-meter you could access that told you how many people were visiting your blog, but he never looked at it anymore. He didn’t want to know.
—
Constable pulled over four or five cars a week on suspicion of DUI, “suspicion” being more of a legal nicety in this case, since he wouldn’t go to the trouble of turning on his lights unless he saw someone driving in a way that left no real room for doubt—in the wrong lane, or bumping the guardrail, or stopping at a stop sign for a full minute. He usually let them go with a reprimand unless they were repeat offenders. Just seeing the cop lights in your rearview had a pretty sobering effect on most people.
He tried not to let other feelings influence his judgment, for instance whether or not the driver was someone he knew, or whether he liked or disliked them or whether they were decently respectful as he performed his sworn duty or whether they gave him shit about it. In his own good judgment, he felt, there was fairness, and he tried to maintain that equilibrium even when people made no sense. You’d pull a woman over after you saw her backing down an entrance ramp to the Mass Pike, and then you’d tell her you were going to let her go with a warning, and instead of thanking you she’d scream at you about the police state and then give you the finger as she rolled up her window. But lately everybody just seemed chippier about everything. He’d been reamed out the other day by a weekender whose house had been broken into and defaced; Constable explained that the perpetrators were probably kids and that home surveillance video (which this bald posh city dude could obviously afford a thousand times over) was really the best bet in terms of preventing it from happening again, and the guy just went off on some rant about his tax dollars. Where were all his tax dollars going?
And once in a while you’d get the opposite, where somebody you’d let go, or even somebody you didn’t, developed a weird attachment to you, like they went out of their way to thank you for your service and to act submissive when they saw you again. Nothing wrong with that—Constable was all for anything that made his job easier—but people took it too far, trying to act as informants, giving him a tip about a neighbor who was down at the Ship getting hammered, or about someone getting paid off the books at the Price Chopper, stuff he had no jurisdiction over, nor any interest in.
A man he’d popped for his third DUI—it was the middle of the day, he’d had his kids in the car, in the end the guy did ten days in the Pittsfield jail awaiting trial and lost his license for a year—forwarded him, at his work email, which he’d thought was a secret, some anonymous blog that claimed there was going to be a rally or a protest or something on Main Street in Howland on October 11 “Have you seen this???” was the guy’s subject line. Constable hadn’t seen it, and it didn’t strike him as something to worry about. It had a sad, homemade look. Probably just some local crackpot. He was mildly curious who it was, from a gossip standpoint more than as a matter of law enforcement. The blogger was ranting about the security cameras, which Constable had told the First Selectman were a bad idea to begin with. Actually, no, he corrected himself, he hadn’t told anyone that, at the time; he’d only thought it. He’d taken it as a sort of passive-aggressive message that the Board of Selectmen thought he wasn’t doing his job well enough. Well, he couldn’t be everywhere. They should try doing it, even for one night, if they thought it was so easy.
He Googled this so-called rally to see if any other websites or newspapers had picked it up, but he found nothing. Before he went home for the night he repeated the search and got the same negative result.
It was only after he left work that night, when he was home with his family, that he found the whole idea a little harder to dismiss. He didn’t think it was real, but how could you tell when anger was real and when it was not? If you were any kind of cop, you knew, or felt, the difference between intuition and simple paranoia. He called up the blog and read it again: reading it in his home rather than at work made the language of it seem more ominous somehow. In the end he decided to kick it upstairs—to show it to Hadi, so he couldn’t be blamed, at least not exclusively, if this supposed protest materialized into something he should have been better prepared for.
In his full uniform, which normally he might not wear when he wasn’t patrolling, he went to Town Hall and asked that turtle-eyed lady whom nobody knew if he could have a few minutes with her boss on an urgent police matter.
“I’m sure that’s no problem,” the lady said, unsmilingly but calmly. He preferred it when phrases like “urgent police matter” ruffled people a little bit. “But he isn’t in yet this morning.”
“When do you expect him?”
That, for some reason, brought out a smile. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she said. “He has no appointments today, so he’ll be in when he chooses to come in.”
“Should I just wait, then?” Constable said.
“You mean wait here? Oh, I wouldn’t. There’s no telling how long it might be.” She made that type of eye contact that professional people made with you when they were trying to signal politely that their encounter with you was done.
So he went across the street to the Undermountain and had a coffee and a western omelet. He picked a stool at the counter where if he leaned back a little he could see the entrance to the Town Hall parking lot. People came in and out, pretty briskly that time of morning, and every one of them stared curiously at him in his full uniform, wondering if something was wrong. The uniform was always like that: both magnet and shield. The crowd at the diner was pretty mixed, in terms of locals and tourists, mostly because of its prime location; there were places where you could get an omelet at less larcenous prices, but the tourists didn’t know how to find them.
It was becoming a different town, Constable thought. Just the way the people looked. The locals geared everything toward attracting the moneyed people and then resented them when they came. The rich folks came looking for some country vibe but then seemed to want to protect themselves, to wall themse
lves off from whatever it was they meant to enjoy or absorb. Those feelings had always been there but now it was like they were rising to the surface. I mean just look, he said to himself, at that white-haired couple there, with their wind-burned faces and pastel clothing and Tanglewood tote bag, arguing quietly about how much to tip on a shared muffin. Constable himself experienced a reflexive contempt for them. Yet God help this place if they went away and never came back.
Just then he saw a black SUV pull into the Town Hall lot and disappear behind the building. He signaled for his check to the waitress, who smiled and discreetly waved him off; he left a five-dollar tip. Trying not to rush, he made his way back across Main Street.
The secretary directed him right in, and he stood in front of Hadi’s desk waiting for him to look up from whatever was absorbing him on his laptop screen. Constable was at attention but he was pretty sure this was lost on Hadi. Oddly checked out for a leader, Constable had always thought. The fact that he had a lot of money—something fundamental about him that you couldn’t see but still knew—gave even his leadership a behind-the-scenes quality, a sense of his operating on some level other than what he showed you, like a spy.
Finally the First Selectman glanced up. Constable explained the reason for his visit, and he watched as Hadi called up the Workingman’s Dread blog on his laptop. He read it rapidly. “Okay,” he said, and turned on Constable a patient look.
“So I don’t think there’s anything to this,” Constable said. “I mean the internet is basically all talk. People can say whatever they want. Doesn’t make it true.”
“I suppose that’s right,” Hadi said.
“I just wanted you to know it was on my radar,” Constable said. “And of course to ask for any instruction on how it’s to be handled, if it turns out to exist at all.”
