I picked up a carton of milk, a box of cereal, granola bars, dried apples, cheese, bread and eggs. I thought my basket looked pretty pathetic, so I went back and took a couple more Kraft dinners. On the way to the register, I grabbed a tin of instant coffee. My bill came out just under budget. I left with my backpack full of provisions and continued on my walk around the square.
There was a bookstore. I hadn’t seen one of them in a long time. Remembering my promise to start reading again, I wove through the crowd to get there. Inside, the selection was sparse. As far as fiction was concerned, the shelves were dominated by the classics, re-published by Everything Press in bland, uniform covers. All paperback. I tilted out a copy of Moby Dick, a book I’d never finished, but had always planned to read again. I checked the price on the back cover—ten credits. I read the first few paragraphs with this strange sense of guilt I didn’t understand right away. I looked around the bookstore; there were only four other patrons. Just the five of us, hiding between the shelves, taking secretive little peeks into books. Maybe it was the idea of peeking into a world outside the institutional greys and whites of Enterprise, where uniformity fell only into the structures of paragraphs and pages. The guilt was that of attempting an escape. I took the book to the register and presented my card, somehow harboring this illogical notion that I would be caught doing it.
On the way back to the building, my copy of Moby Dick hidden securely in my backpack, I planned to cook a box of macaroni and cheese using two of the paltry cheese packets; one from the original box, and one from another. Along with my new novel, two traitorous acts against the status quo. But before I turned back to the building, I thought I’d take a walk around the rest of the hive, just to have a look around.
The residential district was comprised of a number of massive buildings just like mine, roughly the same shape and size. Likely the same number of units—4,400 of them each—although it was impossible to know for sure. I counted eight buildings on my walk back and tried doing the math in my head. That was 4,400 x 8. 32,320 units for the employees at Everything Inc. I’d heard there were 50,000, but there couldn’t have been that many units in the hive. 35,000 maximum, I figured, and even that was pushing it. Maybe there was another residential area in an area of town I hadn’t seen. There would have to have been.
I’d have liked to do some more exploration, but with only one day off a week, and as tired as I was on that day, there wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity to snoop around. I was curious about the power plant on the west side of town. What was so secretive about it? I wanted to take a walk around it, not to try and get inside or anything, only to walk the perimeter. Only to know whatever it was that they didn’t want me to know. Dan did enough sneaking around himself, didn’t he? I was tired of being a sucker. I ought to be a little more like Dan, I thought.
CHAPTER 11
MY FEET HAD MERCIFULLY begun to adjust to all the standing, so I decided to walk back to the hive one day after work. If I kept a brisk pace, I should have no trouble getting back before curfew.
The daytime heat was lifting quickly, bringing behind it the dry, uninsulated desert cold. The crenelated shadows of the hive buildings stretched across the asphalt in the moonlight like the teeth of a giant beast. 4,400 units each. Dim little lights in all the tiny prison windows. I was reminded again how there only could have been 35,200 units, and wondered again how there could possibly be 50,000 employees in only that amount of space. Something about it was unsettling. It shouldn’t have been; I was sure there was a perfectly good explanation for it, but it continued to eat at me.
Dan was already good and buzzed by the time I got back. I thought of bringing up the employee conundrum, but he had his own dilemma he wanted to talk about.
He polished off his beer in just a couple of swigs. “I wanted to be a writer. Have I told you that, doggie?” He belched loudly.
“Yeah, you told me.”
Some of the books I’d seen in his room were about writers. A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, On Writing by Stephen King, that kind of stuff. Even if he’d never brought it up, I’d have figured he probably picked up a pen himself at one point or another.
He reached for another beer and snapped off the cap and promptly drank down half the bottle. “Writing. That was my only ever bad habit.” He belched again.
“That was it, huh?”
“I’d think up stories while I was working and sit down after dinner and type ‘em out. Debbie hated it, she wanted me to watch her shows with her.”
“What kind of stuff did you write?”
“Eh, I don’t know. Wrote this one story where this kid, this kid that gets picked on a lot in school, he’s walking home one day, and there’s this old toilet perched on someone’s curb, waiting to be picked up by the garbage man, you know?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, well... So the kid’s walking by, and he hears something funny. And he turns to look, but it’s just the toilet bowl standing there. So he starts to walk again, but he hears the noise, and he turns to look, and there’s the toilet with the lid moving up and down. So he goes closer...”
“Yeah...”
“And closer... And the lid lifts up a little and the toilet goes ‘Randy,’ because that’s the kid’s name, ‘Randy, I know what they say to you. I know what they do to you at school. And I know how to make them stop.’ and Randy, the kid, he thinks he’s seeing things, right?”
“Right...”
Dan took a long swig. “So Randy leans closer to the old toilet bowl. He goes: ‘I’ve lost my mind.’ And the toilet bowl says, ‘I am Flushtor from the planet…’ well, I forget what the planet was called, but the point is, it’s not a toilet. It’s an alien. It just looks exactly like a toilet. The whole race looks like toilets.”
“Should’ve been Planet Porcelain,” I said.
Dan grinned and took another swig. “That’s ridiculous, Pauly, it would’ve made the whole thing unbelievable. Anyway, the aliens are telepathic, so it was able to read Randy’s thoughts, you know? So it teaches him how to overthrow the bullies at school and everything. You get the idea.”
“I love it.”
“Eh...” Dan finished his beer and dangled the bottle off the side of the chair. “I quit all that, I told you, it was a bad habit.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“… The whole time I was sitting there writing, I never considered why the hell I was doing it. The minute I did, I realized I had no answer. Debbie was right, I was crazy. Because there was no real reason to do what I was doing. No one was ever going to buy it or print it or anything. No one even read stories anymore. So when I really asked myself why, the only real answer I could come up with was that I was amusing myself.” He held up his hands as if to say he didn’t know. “So here we are, the wife and I, sitting in separate rooms and I’m just amusing myself. It’s masturbation, is what it is.”
“You know Moby Dick wasn’t regarded as a great book until after Melville died.”
“Sure, I know that. Not sure why, but...”
“Things change. The book didn’t change, everyone else did. Suddenly, Moby Dick is a masterpiece.”
Dan nodded for a moment. “So what’re you gettin’ at, doggie?”
“Well maybe you thought you were just amusing yourself, but what if you were doing something bigger than that?” I polished off my beer and slipped the bottle into an empty six-pack. “Maybe Mellville’s old lady told him he was wasting his time when the critics started shitting on him. But her opinion isn’t so important now, is it?”
He grinned, staring glassily into space for a second. “So you’re saying Flushtor could’ve been the next Moby Dick?”
“Well, it could’ve been something.”
He considered it a minute.
“So you’re saying I should give it another go?”
“Shit, I’ll read it.”
That seemed to bring his eyes into focus. Some glimmer of something that wasn’t there befor
e. It may have actually sobered him up a bit.
“I don’t know, Pauly. I haven’t had much luck with second tries.”
“I haven’t had much luck with anything,” I said. “But whatever you’re chasing…”
He grinned. “You’re smarter than you look, you know that, Paulo?”
CHAPTER 12
AT A QUARTER PAST MIDNIGHT, well-past the time when all the day-shift guys were supposed to be sleeping, two sets of Everything-issued boots began their tapdance down the hallway. Dan and I met eyes; it wasn’t unusual to hear the boots stepping down the hall late at night, but there seemed to be purpose in these steps, not the leisurely pace they normally took, but like a couple of fish flopping on the floor of a boat. And then they stopped. Right in front of my door.
Knock knock knock. “Mister Harper?”
I motioned for Dan to hurry back to his room, but he didn’t move. He only sat there grinning.
“Mister Harper, we have the right to open this door without your permission. So you could either do it, or we’ll do it for you.”
I glared at Dan, still unmoving, only grinning back at me. What was he thinking? Were the officers bluffing? If they opened the door and saw us both in here, we’d be in trouble. We could be launched right out into the street, he understood that, didn’t he? The old sentiment flitted through my mind; that inevitable conclusion, where in my mind, all paths seemed to lead. Was I about to become a failure? Again?
It was too late.
The door opened. Two of the sharply-dressed officers stood in the doorway, wide-eyed at the scene. “You’re in violation of Code Ten,” one said.
“And Thirteen,” said the other, eyeing the empty beer bottles.
“Yeah,” said Dan. “I suppose you’re right.”
I had no reply. There was no defending ourselves; we’d willingly broken the bylaws, and now we were in trouble. But Dan seemed calm as ever.
The officers looked queerly at each other. Neither of them paid attention to the closet. They only knew that Dan had illegally left his own room and I’d let him in mine.
“You’ll both be fined a full week’s credits in accordance with the Hive Bylaws. Further violations will result in steeper penalties. A second violation will result in—”
“You get paid commission for handing out fines?” Dan asked.
The officers looked confused. “We’re salary,” one said, “same as everyone else.”
“So what do you have to gain by fining good guys like us besides bad karma? I’ll tell you what, how about a little gratuity for a job well done...”
Dan pulled out his wallet. “Off the books,” he said, and took out a fifty-dollar bill. They seemed staggered by just the sight of it. I must have too. The officer that had spoken looked at the other officer. He nodded.
“Of course the real reward is being good to your fellow man,” Dan said.
Silently, the officer held out his hand.
The officers left, fifty dollars richer. Tax-free money. The kind you could stuff under your mattress.
It was a minute before I had my nerves settled enough to talk. I couldn’t believe he’d had the balls to do what he’d done. Granted, I might have felt differently if it hadn’t worked, but it had.
“Where did you get the cash?” I asked him.
“I’ve been hanging on to that bill,” Dan said. “You gotta get the officers good and filthy if you want to stretch out a little.” He linked his fingers through his long hair and put his boots up on my end table. “Like a hunter. Gotta wait for the perfect moment to strike.”
The fifty had marked them like a cattle prod, Dan explained; certified corrupt. We’d forged an agreement, the four of us, and we all had each other by the balls. It couldn’t be allowed to escalate, he told me, not like it had for Dave. But as long as we kept quiet, they’d keep quiet too.
“What if they come back looking for more?” I asked.
“You know what kind of jobs are reserved for dirty law-enforcement?” There was a satisfied smirk on his face. “Let ‘em come back looking for more. They’d sooner dig up a turnip.”
I would sooner dig up a turnip than explain the mixture of feelings going through my head at that moment. I knew how I wanted to feel; I wanted to be thankful. I wanted to high-five Dan for a job well-done. But how I really felt was more complicated than that. It was so clear to me at that moment that I’d never have been able to do it by myself. How never in my life had I been able to open my mouth and make anything notable happen, let alone urge anyone in a particular direction. And as thankful as I was to have the officers off our backs, I wished I could have made it happen myself, or at least helped. I just wasn’t made of the same stuff Dan was. And that’s why I’d been a failure. That’s why I hadn’t even opened my mouth as I saw my family slipping away. If only I’d been made of different stuff, maybe everything would have been different. Maybe Dr. Thurmond’s money wouldn’t even have mattered to us.
“There’s always a weakness, doggie.”
CHAPTER 13
THE POWERS-THAT-BE at Everything Inc. offered a constant flow of opposing force to us workers, like a tolerable storm whose winds never died down. While Dan and I did our best to make our stay as comfortable as possible, there were always new rules, always stricter guidelines, and they never seemed to be for any necessary reason. It was like they only wanted to make it more difficult not to get in trouble.
You always had the feeling you were being watched. Maybe not literally watched, but monitored somehow. They seemed to know when you were at home, know when you’re sleeping, know when you’re up. The television would just pop on by itself when there was something they wanted you to see. That’s how I learned about the new “Performance Policy Amendment” one morning.
The face on the screen was our benevolent president, Len Carter, smiling that precarious smile of his. Always seeming to teeter between personalities. Dan had explained to me that the people behind those smiles were always dangerous. “Bit like a gator gar,” he’d said. And if he hadn’t told me that, it never would have occurred to me, naive as I was.
“As employees of Everything Incorporated, you are entitled to be informed of all policy updates. Regarding our performance policy, a few minor updates have been instituted to preserve and maintain the quality of our products and services. To pre-frame these adjustments, I’ll restate that at Everything Inc., our model is to never ask too much of our employees. All of our jobs are designed to be easily performable by anyone of any age or gender, given proper training. It is our strict policy never to ask too much of our workers, and to provide the means and materials to offer a reasonable day’s work. If for any reason an employee is unable to work with reasonable expectations, adjustments may be made, or a transfer to another job may be completed. If you feel that you qualify for an adjustment or transfer, ask your supervisor. Otherwise, an employee chronically un-productive will be administered a series of strikes. Once an employee reaches his or her third strike, he or she will be rejected from his or her position and his or her lodging will then be forfeit. That is all.”
I knew Dan was probably seeing the same thing next door. I wondered what he thought of it. Vague enough, yet deliberate enough to seem both innocuous and threatening at once, like a tornado watch in an unlikely place. But with the tension at Everything Inc. seeming to stiffen all of a sudden, you got this feeling like there was an axe falling, ever so slowly, over all us slaving losers. Reinforcing the notion was my quiet suspicion that there wasn’t quite the number of employees at Everything Inc. as advertised. There just wasn’t enough room, and with all the new people constantly coming in, there must be an increasing pressure to get the old ones out. I sounded conspiratorial to myself, but I was also tired of being so naive. It seemed to me that the hurdle for acceptable production was slowly being raised. It would have to be.
CHAPTER 14
“HOW MANY EMPLOYEES does Everything have here?” I asked Jack, already knowing what his answer woul
d be.
“50,000 on average,” he said.
“I told you that already,” said Dan.
“But do they all live in the hive? Is there any other residential area in Enterprise?”
“Nah,” said Ronnie. “They’re strict about that. They like to know where everyone’s at.”
“That’s how they keep their thumb on top of you,” Jack affirmed.
“I was thinking about it. There’s just no way 50,000 people live in the hive.”
“On average,” said Ronnie. “People come and go. This ain’t for everyone, ya know.”
“My building has 4,400 units. If all the buildings are like mine, that’s eight buildings with 4,400 units. That’s 35,200, maximum. So where are all the rest?”
“Hell,” Ronnie said. “If I was any good at math, you think I’d be here?”
“Hell yeah, you would,” said Jack.
“I’m just curious,” I said. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe there’re more units in some of the other buildings,” Dan said. “Ronnie, what building are you in?”
“Four,” said Ronnie.
“Alright,” I said. “So when you go home later, have a look at the chart in the stairwell. You should be able to figure it out.”
“What about that plant?” Dan said. “Supposed to be exclusive people working the plant. Maybe they live somewhere else?”
“Could be,” I said. “But not 14,800 of them.”
“I live in building six,” said Jack. “I’ll check my chart too.”
“If it turns out the buildings are the same,” Dan went on, “You’re right, Pauly. That’s a little strange.”
“Any of ‘em shack up in the same room?” asked Jack.
“No way,” said Ronnie. “Against the bylaws, one man per-room. Don’t need any of us working idiots coming up with conspiracies and shaking things up.”
Everything Inc.: The Precious and the Broken Page 4
