Welcome to Dystopia

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Time to speak again. “Yes, Apprentice-First—”

  “And that asshole Wedley was your boss.”

  “Yes, Appren—”

  “Shut your loser mouth! I already know he was.”

  I say nothing, but my mind is racing. Charlie Wedley saw it coming, as soon as the TSA lost its funding. He packed a suitcase, transferred his accounts to the Bank of Montreal, and made it over the line well before the bus loads of black-uniformed bruisers from the Corps of Apprentices arrived to replace Homeland Security at all the airports and border crossings. Only the day before he had told me I should get ready to run, too, but I hadn’t seen it as clearly as he did. Besides, Arthur was in school and Sharon had just been promoted to a senior post at the Andrew Jackson Institute.

  Carmody has leaned forward and is reading from a paper in a file spread open on his desk. “Says here you two were real close.” He looks up and makes a noise of contempt. “Couple of fudge-packers.”

  I say nothing. It wasn’t a question, and I know better than to contradict an Apprentice’s judgment.

  He studies me again for a long moment. I know he’ll be wanting an excuse to knock me down and kick me and I am beginning to wonder why he hasn’t. Usually, a call to the admin center involves at least some stains on fists and boots, which the recipient of the attentions are often required to wipe away—if they are still conscious.

  Now he closes the file. “You make me sick, loser,” he says. “Was up to me, none of you pussies would be building the Wall. You’d be under it.”

  I say nothing, think nothing, let Our President fill my vision. The chair creaks again. Carmody is closing the file. Now he says, “Somebody is interested in you, loser. Somebody upstairs, way upstairs.”

  He picks up the phone and pushes a button. A moment later, he says, “Is the car here?” then grunts a response to whatever he’s heard and hangs up. He looks at me and says, “You’re going for a ride, faggot.”

  The car is a shiny black Cadillac Escalade with opaque windows and doors emblazoned with Our President’s one-letter monogram in gold. An Apprentice wearing a tailored uniform and the shoulder bars of a captain stands waiting by a rear door. He favors me with a cold-eyed stare as he opens the door and moves his head minimally in a gesture that says: Get in.

  I get in and the door closes silently behind me. For a moment I can see nothing, then my eyes adjust to the gloom and I see that the passenger compartment is self-contained. A pull-down folding seat faces the vehicle’s wide rear bench where a man in civilian clothes sits silently. Like his aide, who is now climbing behind the wheel and starting the engine, he says nothing—just uses one pale finger to indicate that I should sit on the jump seat.

  I sit and reach down to grip the sides of my perch, which becomes precarious as the Escalade accelerates through the gate and turns sharply onto the road outside. I can hardly see the man opposite me, though I can smell him: cologne and powder. For the first time in months, I become conscious of the rank, sour smell that rises from my own body. I feel a louse move in my armpit but resist the automatic urge to pinch it dead with my long, broken-edged fingernails.

  The road parallels the Wall and we drive past the segments that Camp 17 has built in the half-year since we were bused down here from wherever we had been arrested. Twenty feet high, its top festooned with sharp steel spikes, razor wire, and broken glass, it stretches on, mile after mile, running roughly east–west on this part of the border. A segment is one hundred and fifty feet wide, and as each is built and capped, the camp is uprooted and moved to the next piece of desert.

  The admin block, the Apprentices’ barracks, and the kitchens are on wheels, towed by trucks. The razor-wire fences are lifted and carried by us, the three hundred losers of Camp 17. There is no need to move our barracks because we have none; we sleep in our rags on the bare desert floor, huddled together for warmth. Our latrines are slit trenches dug in one corner of the compound.

  It is possible to get under the razor wire and escape into the desert. Some have done it. But the constantly circling drones that look for illegals soon spot them: their body heat shines against the dark cold of the nighttime desert floor. But no one wastes a missile on them; soon enough, the temperature differential equalizes. And no one bothers to collect the corpses.

  The Wall-building project began in late January, just days after Our President took office and started signing all those executive orders. By the fall, he was ruling by emergency decree. The nature and extent of the “emergency” were never detailed; the Corps of Apprentices had been quietly forming even before the voting in November. As the leaves began to fall in Washington, the truck-borne squads were already rolling out to collect the losers who had failed to support his history-making campaign. As a staff columnist on what used to be considered an influential mainstream conservative magazine, I was a natural target. Journalists dubbed “enemies of the people” had already been dropping out of sight. Some said they were in hiding, but there were rumors that people had been snatched off the streets, hustled into black vans, and never heard from again. But nobody reported on it, because the fear had begun to set in.

  Then came the emergency decree and Our President unleashed his attack dogs. In the pre-dawn, doors were kicked in, people hustled from their beds, wrists pinioned by plastic slip-on restraints. A few shots were fired, but the Apprentices brought overwhelming firepower. Besides, most of us couldn’t believe it was happening until it was too late. We climbed out of the boxcars in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to stand, stiff and blinking, hungry and dehydrated. The razor wire was already in place and the club-wielding Apprentices were more than ready to teach us the camp rules. Most of us learned quickly; those who didn’t were thrown into the latrine trenches we left behind when the camp moved.

  As the months wore on and the Wall grew, more losers were captured and brought in, usually a dozen at a time. Some had been hidden in basements and attics by friends and relatives who weren’t on the lists—though their names certainly got added once their lack of devotion to Our President was discovered. Others had been caught making a wilderness run for the Canadian border; Washington state to British Columbia was the usual venue. And a few had tried to hide out in remote cabins, but even the remotest places were known to somebody and the rewards for turning in losers were attractive.

  But in all the time I have spent in Camp 17, no one has ever been taken away in an Apprentice staff car.

  I hear a rustle of paper then a discreet click. A small cone of light falls from a fixture beside the Escalade’s rear door onto a manila folder on the lap of the man opposite me. When he opens the file, enough light reflects from the white paper within for me to get a vague impression of his face: clean-shaven, lean, hollow-cheeked, high-browed, and white—almost a fleshless skull. He glances down at whatever is written there and when he looks up at me the skull impression is reinforced by the eyes remaining in shadow.

  Now he closes the folder and turns off the light. He retreats back into obscurity. The voice that speaks to me from the darkness is cultured, intelligent.

  “Your October fifteenth piece in the Comment,” he says, as I hear the sound of a finger tapping the file. “Good insight.” When I say nothing, he adds, “You may speak.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Good thing the mass of the punditry didn’t come to the same conclusions,” he says. “Or we might not have won.”

  I say, “I think by then…” and stop myself from saying it would have been too late to opt for a more neutral phrase: “…the die was cast.”

  He makes a neutral sound. “Perhaps.” Then he lapses into silence.

  The article he referred to advanced an argument I’d been thinking about as I watched the presidential primary go from strange to bizarre and then seen Our President emerge as the most unlikely candidate in the nation’s history. Other commentators were focusing on demographics—older white males, evangelicals, libertarians, Tea Party activists—as well as ec
onomic and social shifts, but all of those factors taken together were not enough to account for the fundamental paradigm shift that was revolutionizing American politics.

  And then, in mid-October, I was walking back to the office from lunch and passed a sportswear store. The window display was full of sweatshirts, and every one of them was adorned with a corporate logo of some kind. For some reason, I flashed on a sweatshirt I’d had in college: it bore a line-drawn portrait of Ludwig Van Beethoven on the front. I wondered for a moment what had happened to it.

  And that’s when I noticed the obvious. Thirty-four years ago, when I’d been that college boy, we might wear sweatshirts with “Yale” or “Princeton” on them, because we were students at those schools, or pictures of Alfred E. Neuman if we were smartasses. But we didn’t turn ourselves into walking billboards for commercial products.

  Over the decades, something had changed, and as I walked back to my office and sat behind my desk, the nature of that change emerged, full-blown, into my consciousness. I turned on my computer, powered up MS Word, and put my fingers on the keyboard.

  We used to be citizens of a society, I wrote, but now we are just consumers in an economy. I thought a moment, then typed again. The society was ours; we had rights and responsibilities. The economy is everybody’s and nobody’s, and all we have is “likes.”

  And as I sat there, following my train of thought, it led me onward. Our mental operating systems have been reset by the increasingly sophisticated, ever more powerful, and all-pervasive force called marketing. We have been conditioned to think—no, not to think, only to feel—only in terms of our own individual wants and needs—“You deserve a break today” instead of what’s good or bad for the whole.

  I thought about the candidate who was to become Our President—even though the polls said he couldn’t crack the Electoral College. And it came to me. I typed, He is not a politician; he is a celebrity. His supporters do not follow him—he does not lead, but simply exists as a brand they can like. He does not have policies; he has marketable qualities that lead consumers to “like” his brand: it makes them feel good about themselves.

  Pundits like me were prisoners of the old political system, the one created and sustained by our citizen ancestors. But their society was gone. It had been gradually washed away by the power of marketing, leaving only the economy with its different rules and mechanisms.

  The man who would become Our President had recognized the paradigm shift. And he had done so years, even decades, ago. He had spent those years marketing himself as a celebrity brand, creating for himself a platform from which he could leap from the sinking society onto the command deck of the still accelerating economy.

  The article poured out of me as if it had been gestating in the back of my head for ages. And perhaps, I thought, it had. I’d noticed, as a young man, when reporters had stopped asking the people they interviewed what they thought and began asking, “How do you feel?” I remembered the slight sense of disconnect I’d experienced the first time I saw a clothing label on the outside of a collar instead of the inside, and when I’d first realized that my conservative shoes had the brand name stamped on the heel, so that anyone walking behind me would see it flashing at them with my every step.

  Marketing, I wrote, is now our complete environment. We are marketed to thousands of times a day, and we no more notice it than a fish notices the water that surrounds it.

  But the candidate had noticed it. He had seen the new age rising around him and had made full use of his vision. As I finished the article, I complimented him. I said the rest of us were like a passel of ape-men huddled in night’s darkness while one of us—a genius—rubbed two sticks together and made fire.

  I polished a few phrases and sent the copy to my editor, Charlie Wedley. It ran in the next edition. Two weeks later, the election came and then the months of interregnum while we wrote speculative analyses and profiles of the strange collection of folks with which Our President intended to fill his cabinet. And we waited to see what a celebrity brand would do if granted the leadership of the free world.

  It got pretty crazy right away, but people said he’d grow into the office. Nine months after the inauguration, we found out what had been gestating in the White House.

  “We want you to do something for us,” says the cultured voice from the darkness.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Is that ‘Yes, I’ll do it’?”

  I don’t have to think. Months of building the Wall have made me compliant, as it was meant to do. “Yes, I’ll do it.”

  “It will involve betraying a friend.”

  A year ago, I would have been brave, would have given a short answer: Forget it, or another two-word phrase that began with “F.” Now I scarcely hesitate before saying, “In the loser camps, friends are no help. They’re just another liability.”

  “Good,” says the voice. “If you deliver, you won’t have to go back to the camp. You’ll be declared fully rehabilitated. Actually, we can use you at Apprentice Central. And your wife and son will join you.”

  I am too numb to feel anything yet, but I notice that my cheeks are wet. I raise a hand and find that my eyes are full of tears.

  “What do I have to do?” I say, then listen closely while he tells me.

  A week later, they have cleaned me up, deloused me, cleared the worms from my intestines, fed me, and shot me full of vitamins. They have flown me from San Antonio to Fairchild AFB near Spokane, Washington, where a special forces helicopter delivers me silently to a spot on the Columbia River south of the Forty-Ninth Parallel. It is a moonless night and overcast. We touch down in complete darkness, one set of hard-handed men unloading me from the copter into the equally hard hands of another crew. I assume they are all wearing night-vision gear because they move me swiftly down to the water’s edge, put me in a rubber boat, climb in with me, and push us out. It is only when I feel the slight breeze of our passage on my face that I realize they have started a motor as noiseless as the helicopter’s.

  I have no idea how long we are on the river. I see few lights on the shore until we pass a small airport on the eastern bank, then we are back into blackout travel. Eventually, I see the lights of a town and the boat angles in to the west bank and grounds on a patch of gravel. There is enough illumination from the town reflecting off the overcast for me to see the men in the boat as vague shadows.

  One of them presses something into my hand—the strap of a half-sized duffel bag—and whispers, “You get out here. There’s a road up a little ways. Find the bus depot. There’s money in the bag.”

  I don’t hear them go. I climb the bank, push through some low scrub, and come to a two-lane blacktop. I turn toward the lights of the town and start walking. They made me memorize a rough map of the place—it’s called Trail—and I find the bus depot easily enough; it is on Bank Street, which is a continuation of Riverside Avenue, the road they directed me to.

  The depot is a little blue-and-white frame structure. I wait outside until a tired-looking man in jeans and a cotton shirt opens up. As I hitch up my bag and step through the door, he says, “Where to?”

  “Vernon, then Kamloops,” I say. If he asks, I will tell him I am meeting my brother in Vernon, but he just punches some buttons and hands me the paper slip that his ticket machine printed out. I pay with one of the used Canadian bills they put in my wallet and go to sit on one of the benches. The ticket says the night bus from Alberta will arrive and depart in about an hour and it will reach the Vernon depot in midafternoon. I will then catch another bus to Kamloops and be there before evening.

  I sit, looking straight ahead, my inner eye replaying the images of Sharon and Arthur on the phone of the man in the A-Corps staff car—I never learned his name. My wife and son looked worried but unbruised and reasonably healthy. They hadn’t been put to punishment labor as I was.

  The street door opens and a man and a woman come in. She has a rounded figure but looks strong; he is taller and leaner
but moves like an athlete. They both wear holstered automatic pistols, khaki shirts, dark trousers with a yellow stripe, and matching flat caps with shiny leather bills.

  I see them from the side of my vision and the dark pants with the stripe—identical to those worn by the Apprentice guards in the camp—almost trigger an automatic response. But I manage not to leap to my feet and stand to attention. Instead, I look straight ahead, a man with some thinking to do.

  Until they stand over me. “Hey, there,” says the female Mountie, “who are you?”

  I look up then and give them the name that matches my ID.

  “Where you from? And where are you headed?”

  “To Kamloops, from Eastend, Saskatchewan.”

  I say the name of the latter place easily, using the pronunciation my handlers drilled into me: “It’s Suh-skatch-uh-one. That’s how the Canucks say it. Americans say Sass-katch-uh-one. Dead giveaway.”

  The male cop already has his phone out and is working its icons and keyboard. “Who’s the mayor there?”

  I tell him.

  “Where’s the co-op store?”

  “Corner of Maple and Railway.”

  He flicks the screen a couple of times. “Tourist attraction?”

  “T-Rex Center,” I say “Listen, what’s this all about, eh?” Canadians are polite but don’t stand for police harassment.

  “Border jumpers,” the female Mountie says. “Let’s see your ID.”

  I show them my Saskatchewan driver’s license. It is good enough to fool them and they hand it back. “Watch out for anybody tries to be too friendly,” says the male cop, putting his phone away. “Some of these jumpers, they’ll steal your identity. And you won’t complain because you’ll be dead in a ditch.”

  I tell him I didn’t know it was that bad, which is true. But I am not surprised. I know what motivates most Americans who come over the Forty-Ninth and how far they will go to keep from being sent back.