The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

  The number of jobs in our great nation had dropped drastically in recent years. The administration’s solution to this was to keep people in their current jobs, sometimes with force. The administration wanted those without jobs to yearn for them, and, also, did not want the unemployed to know what many of the current jobs actually entailed. As employees often had complaints, on a wide range of topics, the government’s response was a onetime financial reimbursement, with the caveat that the complaints would remain secret and never be shared. I had no idea why I was one of the few selected for this department—my essay skills weren’t that great, and universities were still churning out students, thousands each year, for the foundation of a productive nation was the ability to manufacture hope. I had made a point of this in my essay, the redemptive powers of hope in our great country, of the ways we could be generous to one another. This last point, I would later learn, is what prompted Mr. Watson to hire me.

  I could tell almost no one that I found a job. I said that I was going to visit a relative in Maryland who needed help. That was an acceptable answer—it was what many recent graduates ended up doing—moving in with frail, ancient relatives who were trying to live on nothing and had an extra room. There was a special interest in relatives who were very ill and barely ate, thereby allowing the graduated students to eat their rations. Telling others about my job could be dangerous; some friends who had graduated with me and found work had been followed to their place of employment and attacked. This was a trend I was hearing about—those who followed the fortunate ones, and, when they were alone, broke their legs with a steel rod. It was a swift, efficient operation. While the injured workers recovered, the attackers would slip in a résumé. This strategy sometimes worked.

  When I was hired, my supervisor liked to refer to us as the Department of Happiness and Reimbursement, but really I was an assistant in the Office of Workplace Grievances. My task was to read the complaints and organize them by profession, state, city, and amount of reimbursement. There were many to process, every day.

  I’ve been a kindergarten teacher for seventeen years and we pass three books around the classroom, sixty kids. When I started, there were just eighteen kids in class. I had an assistant until a child bit her and her bite got infected and there was no medicine available and she died.

  These are my hours: Monday at noon to Wednesday at noon, without stopping. Then Thursday to Saturday, same. I’m so tired my boss knows I hate it. He says my schedule is easier than most. He schedules me for it every week. I never see my child. I don’t get to take her to school. I’m stuck. The other restaurant is fifteen miles away and I don’t have a car. I am so tired I could fucking die.

  I have to stand naked by the interstate. I thought it was because I have a nice body though I’m advertising an auto repair shop. I want to put my foot down at standing like this in weather under 60 degrees. It gets cold. At least I should be able to wear a sweater. People throw food at me or yell things.

  I would sort the complaints (wages, long hours, exploitive overtime, terrible bosses and colleagues, unhealthy working conditions, etc.), send them to the reimbursement office, receive the amount, and then call up the workers who sent in the complaint and inform them of their claim amount. Mr. Watson had perceived generosity in me, in my voice and my essay (generosity was highly valued in this work and mentioned often in department memos and signs), and had coached me in talking with workers about their reimbursement. I had a natural voice for this, he said. I sounded like someone they could trust.

  “Your reimbursement is $1,208,” I said.

  Or—“Your reimbursement is $872.”

  Or “You will receive a check for $2,509.”

  “The investigation is ongoing.”

  I would hear the pause and shout of joy or Yes! Or Yeah, baby! Or Thank you, God! Or Bless you, honey!

  As instructed, I held the phone and counted to three. I was supposed to pretend to listen, to show that we, the government of our great nation, cared, though the truth was that I actually did listen. I sat in my office, cabinets so crammed with files they wouldn’t close, eavesdropping on this brief moment of joy. It felt real, this joy, and I wanted to hear what that was like. I was proud that I had helped enable this joy, that I was earning a salary, and that this was my vital contribution.

  When I went into the office for my initial interview, I sat in front of Mr. Charles Watson, who had been working in the federal government for many years. He told me, slowly and gravely, that there was nothing to be done about the workers’ situations. Some in Congress thought that there were solutions, but they were people who were unreasonable and soft. The job market was shrinking; this was just a fact. A lucky few would, through the national game show, be rewarded; be happy for them. It was unfortunate that some workers ended up in situations that they didn’t like for their own sad reasons. “Nations,” he said, “reinvent themselves. Some people evolve with it. For them, rejoice!” Mr. Watson was a solid man with thin gray hair, who had a transparent quality about him even though he was sitting, quite solidly, at his desk. But when he spoke of the workforce, his attitude changed, and suddenly he seemed to be wearing a sparkling, diamond suit, though his actual suit was always gray. The difficulties and struggles of others provided a mirror for him to reflect upon his own achievements, as they were; he almost glittered when he spoke of the sorry workforce. I didn’t know much about him. He talked about his mother in a nursing home outside the Capitol; sometimes he picked up dark red roses for her, even though she didn’t know him now, but she reached out to touch the roses each time he brought them.

  Mr. Watson called me in sometimes to discuss the state of the nation. I listened, or I tried to look like I was listening, something I knew how to do. What I heard, mostly, in the rapid, hushed anger of his words, was an anticipation so weighted, the air felt dense, like a pound cake. He appeared to be waiting for something significant. I believed he had been waiting for this for years.

  But then. We were talking about those who did have jobs, but were not happy in them. He told me that there had been studies done on what was called “the disgruntled worker,” there were studies done on workplace shootings, of the cumulative effect of silence on workers, and what he called the “productivity cost” of holding everything in.

  “You think people get sick because of loneliness, or their family, et cetera, and they do, sometimes.” But mostly, he said, “They are mad at work. They would be worse off not at work, as we know, but there at least they hold on to the hope of somehow getting a job. When they are at the office, they see what they’re paid, what they are required to do, what other people get. They feel things are unfair. This is a sad and general perception.” He paused. “So we are here to help.”

  Mr. Watson had many thoughts on generosity, which he shared with me. “One thing I have learned from my years in government,” he said, “is the way my nation has showed me the goodness in myself. An unveiling, as it were. I didn’t realize it when I began, long ago, but I realized it when I saw the vast resources of our department. Look at what we could do! We could solve problems. Others needed to be grateful to us.”

  I, too, wanted to be viewed as a good person. I was sending money back to my family, my dues for my luck in finding this position. I was the oldest of five, and my brothers and sister were still in school; if my family appeared to have enough money, if they seemed to be useful, no one would be sent to the Compounds. My parents worked for a time but had no jobs at the moment (my mother going on two years, my father four), and my contribution helped make them appear to be still employed. I bought a new suit, my mother wrote to me, A navy blazer with rhinestone buttons and pants. In case anyone calls, I’m ready! I got a haircut last week. A nice cut, short, professional. It’s good for people to see. I clutched the phone and listened to my voice roll through, and I wondered, flickeringly, what happened to those who sent in complaints after I hung up, if this reimbursement helped them; I also wondered somet
imes what was happening to me.

  I usually left the office at 6:30, walking along the streets outside the Capitol, past the real workers and those who were paid to pretend. I boarded a train back to my apartment, and my route took it, at one point, by one of the Compounds; it picked up speed and passed the wall with such force, the whole train car rattled. The Compounds were set up behind enormous concrete walls, so no one outside could see inside them. The people who lived there were unemployed, probably forever. They received a limited amount of money each month and food rations, which varied with each new administration. No one knew exactly what they did all day, but there were reports that some Compounds had conditions worse than others, that there was illness left untreated to diminish the numbers of people to feed, that the government did not maintain decent plumbing or water, that houses were crumbling and full of rot. Occasionally, explosions rumbled through some of the Compounds, but no one explained why this was. The point was that there were too many people and not enough for them to do, so all the leftover people were moved into the Compounds.

  What the people in the Compounds could participate in was the national game show. Your New Home united the country once a week, regardless of employment; I didn’t know anyone who didn’t watch. The national game show was a trivia quiz designed by committees of a cross-section of America—construction workers and housekeepers and college professors and scientists and artists and lawyers—it was democratic in this way. But once a week, someone from each city’s Compound won this quiz, and went on to regional quizzes, competing with others who won within their Compounds, and these people appeared on the show, and once a week someone in the nation would win.

  The prize was a mansion, usually one that had been abandoned. They were located in cities all over the country: on the beach in Malibu, for example, on a snowy mountain overlooking Boulder, in a New York skyscraper, in a suburb of Atlanta. The mansions were the focus of everyone’s yearning. Huge monuments of real estate, with ten bedrooms or more, swimming pools shaped like lagoons, tennis courts, vast green gardens. Some resembled Tudor mansions, some were Spanish villas, some French chateaus, some shaped like cubes. There were groups dedicated to refurbishing the mansions, and decorating them, and part of the game show was a detailed tour of the mansion to be won that day. One episode was dedicated simply to a mansion’s closets, showing the various ways a person could store dresses or shoes. A winner was decided each week. Fifty-two winners a year. And then, in an episode that was thrilling every time, the winner and their family were airlifted out of the Compounds to their new home and a generous stipend for life.

  The entire family would be blindfolded, and the most moving part of Your New Home was when the blindfolds were taken off and they walked through the gleaming hallways of the home where they would spend their lives. Every family cried with joy, in a show of emotion that felt cathartic for the nation. We were envious but also relieved that this could happen to someone. Each family became celebrities for a few months, as they adjusted to their new life of comfort, and there were episodes dedicated to how they would furnish their new house, funny arguments about different types of couches or dishes or bedspreads. There was one segment in which a family had a screaming argument about whether to buy Waterford or Mikasa or Spode plates, though in fact they had the fortune now to buy a set of each of them. It culminated with a furious mother-in-law hurling a Waterford pitcher out the window and a dramatic slow-motion arc as the pitcher crashed on the sidewalk below. That slow-mo arc of the doomed pitcher was all anyone talked about for a week. Everyone in the nation yearned to have such arguments. The producers of the show enjoyed airing video of the audience. Across the nation, the camera panned over all of us—the unemployed in the Compounds, faces brilliant with hope as they tried to answer correctly, and the employed, watching them play the game. All of us together watched a winner step out of the limo and, hand trembling, open a mansion’s shining door.

  Shortly after I started at the Department of Happiness and Reimbursement, there was a review of the employees on our floor, and four out of ten were, as they said, “released.” This happened on a Friday, and by Monday they were gone. A chill fluttered through the department. There was much whispering about why the four were fired—some said they submitted reimbursements that were too extravagant; some said they were not saying “Good luck!” firmly enough to turn people away. Sometimes frustrated workers called back, demanding more money, claiming that they did not know the reimbursement was a onetime event. A man once cleverly discovered the location of our office and stood outside of it, shouting, “What the hell, you stingy assholes, nothing’s changed. Nothing! Give me more.” We cowered inside the building, watching him from a window, unsure what he was planning to do, and impressed by the raw rage in his voice; no one could express that sort of feeling in the office. The man was quickly arrested. The department, Mr. Watson reminded us, was a place of generosity. But also of clarity and closure.

  One afternoon, Mr. Watson came into my office and told me that I was being moved downstairs. “It’s actually a promotion,” he said. “You need more space.” I did need more space; the file cabinets were stuffed with files and would not shut, even if I pushed on them, leaning on a drawer with my shoulder. He led me to an office in the basement, which, in addition to the sputtering fluorescent lights, held the dark, wet odor of earth. It did not seem like a promotion; I wondered what was going on.

  “We need, well, a woman in this office,” said Mr. Watson.

  I was a woman, yes, but I almost laughed. He appeared concerned.

  “There has been an uptick in complaints of a particular nature,” he said. “We need someone who will be . . .” He paused. “Sensitive to issues at hand.”

  He brushed some dust off a crack in the wall. I would not describe myself as “sensitive,” though I pretended I was, every day, every call I made, and felt fraudulent that this random and unearned status of womanhood qualified me for this promotion. It seemed the easiest qualification I had ever had, and the most puzzling.

  The next day, when I came to work, movers had efficiently relocated all of my office furniture and items on my desk—the photos of my family, the cactus in the pot—and set them up, exactly as they had been, in my new office. They were clearly ready for me to get to work. There was a sense of dark gloom in the basement, as there was almost no one down here. Some of the empty offices were used for storage, stuffed with old steel desks and swivel chairs. One slow, creaky elevator lifted us to the first floor.

  That week, I noticed other women were also moved down to the basement—they were my age, early twenties. We did not approach each other at first—we seemed to have been selected for a certain shyness, or aloofness, and also an overly muscular diligence, as we spent a great deal of time shut in our offices, organizing filing systems, before the complaints came in. It took us a week to introduce ourselves to each other. There was Kayla, Marianne, Jana, and I; we were from different parts of the nation, and this was the first job for all of us.

  When we spoke, we marveled at the similarity of our voices. Though we had slightly different accents—mine was California, Kayla was Houston, Marianne was New York, Jana was Iowa—our voices shared the same honeyed quality. We sounded freakishly kind, even if perhaps we were not. We laughed as we listened to each other, but I believed we were a little unnerved by this, too.

  Even though I was glad to be promoted, and to be part of this new division helping our great country, I began to dread the moment I heard the elevator open, as the mail person brought the new load of complaints for the day. For there were many. There were complaints from every corner of the nation, from every industry.

  Help me make it stop. I work in the kitchen and when I bend over to pick up a bag of frozen fries my boss grabs my ass and says I want a bite of these juicy buns and I have to wait till he’s not around to get the fries and then people are yelling for their fries because no one can fucking wait for their fries ever and I get in
trouble please help me.

  I clean rooms at the Economy Suites and I can’t go on floor six because he’s waiting for me pretending to check the ice machine but waiting until I get into a room and then once he came in and I fought him off I can’t go to work floor six hasn’t been vacuumed in two weeks because I can’t go to floor six.

  Each morning, I opened the envelopes that held these new kinds of complaints. There were many more than before, and all the complaints came from women, and though I struggled to maintain my efficient pace, I found myself slowing down. I could only read a few at a time before I found myself getting tired. It was a tiredness that seemed to reside in the very center of my bones, that seemed to imply I had run many miles, although I was simply sitting at my desk, reading and sending complaints on for reimbursement.

  I went through the files and met my coworkers each afternoon by the elevator. Our files were confidential, and we were not supposed to discuss them with each other, but we did, in urgent whispers, while we waited for the elevator, before we stepped back into the world.

  “What did you have today?”

  “Numerous ass grabs in Ohio. Food industry.”

  “If you’re ever in an office in Houston, stay away from closets.”

  The hours of listening and saying, in our kind, extremely sensitive tones, “We will begin an investigation and we will inform you shortly of your reimbursement,” in response to women shouting at us or sobbing or whispering so we could barely hear them, was more grueling than any of us would admit.

  Kayla stepped close to us. “One woman in Michigan, her boss liked to taste his female workers. Lick them on the neck.”