CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

by George Saunders

  “You were alone in the world,” it says, “and did a kindness for someone in need. Good for you. Now post this module, and follow this map to the home of Mrs. Ken Schwartz. Care for her with some big money that will come in the mail. Find someone to love. Your heart has never been broken. You’ve never done anything unforgivable or hurt anyone beyond reparation. Everyone you’ve ever loved you’ve treated like gold.”

  DOWNTRODDEN MARY’S

  FAILED CAMPAIGN OF TERROR

  My first and favorite task of the day is slaving over the Iliana Evermore Fairy Castle. It’s lovely. I turn the Maintenance lights off and the fake stars come on automatically. There’s a short in the full moon over the Fire Door, but unfortunately my Recommendations for Corrective Action have been consistently ignored. I dust all the furniture and remake the tiny four-poster, then add colorant to the brook and wax the ballroom floor. I pick lint off the fur items, such as the mouse rug with the teeth still intact and the royal robe contributed by the Peruvian ambassador in the Theodore Roosevelt days. I’m arranging the tiny knights so they appear to be fording the stream when the door flies open and the kids from the most slovenly day-care in the world come screaming in.

  Every morning four minivans pull up and eighty kids pile out and one supervising adult with a magazine. All day long the kids run wild, indiscriminately pushing the interactive exhibit buttons. Today a group of them surround me and ask why I’m wearing a nightgown. I tell them it’s no nightgown, it’s a frock. One cute little fellow says the hell it is. A little girl calls me Grandma and asks if she can try on my wing harness and I say certainly. The minute she gets it on, however, she makes an obscene gesture and runs off. Those wings are fifteen dollars to replace. I can’t afford that. I’m old and stiff but finally I get her cornered near the Audio Enhancement Module. Just as I get my hands on my wings the supervising adult comes rushing up and says how dare I hamper the child’s self-esteem by being critical of her impulses? She tells the little girl that if she takes the wings out into the hall she’ll be free to explore and grow as she sees fit. Then she stands in my path and glares at me.

  An hour later the children have left and my wings have not been returned.

  So I go down to Administration to break the news to Mr. Spencer, Cleaning Coordinator, praying in my heart for a time-deferred payroll deduction.

  On his office wall Mr. Spencer has nine watercolors of the space shuttle and a photograph of himself crying the day the Challenger crashed. He says because he’s in a good mood he’ll give me two weeks to pay for the wings before firing me. Then he asks do I want to know why he’s so happy. I don’t but I say I do. He says he’s so happy because while he was on vacation the see-through cow didn’t die. Spread across his desk are photos of the cow for his up-coming poster session. The see-through cow is his main career asset. Via the cow he hopes to get out of Cleaning and into Curation. Mr. Jorgsen in Applied Biology did the theoretical calculations proving the cow was possible, but he never intended anyone to actually implement. Mr. Spencer got hold of the plans and through slander had Jorgsen demoted to Exhibit Repair. The great scandal the public doesn’t know about however is that the cows don’t last. We’ve been through six already. It’s very hush-hush. When one dies, a special team comes in and alters the new cow to look like the original, using special fur makeup. Then the surgical group whisks it away and implants a Plexiglas window in its flank.

  Mr. Spencer has me listen to his presentation. It concerns ingestion-to-defecation ratios and problems experienced with the flesh/window junction. He throws in a few cow one-liners that are not effective. Of course he doesn’t mention the deaths. When he’s done I tell him it was excellent and he reminds me to subtract the time spent listening to him from my time sheet so I don’t inadvertently get paid for it.

  I get up to leave and he asks what’s next on my agenda. I say Break. He says not so fast, then orders me to clean up some vomit from near the Pickled Babies. I ask him please no. Three stillborns was my lot and the Pickled Babies first thing in the morning is too much.

  But he cheerfully recites the Employee Loyalty Oath and says he’s not in the mood to negotiate and tells me to please shake a leg for Christ’s sake.

  On the way to the Pickled Babies I pass poor Mr. Jorgsen standing forlorn in the railroad diorama. The church comes up to his knees and he’s losing his mind. He feels bad for having designed the see-through cow. Of late he’s been kicking the diorama apart, and the scuttlebutt is he’s one building away from dismissal. I say good morning and he sits down disconsolately on Mount Hood. At the Nutritional Evaluation Module several teenage members of Special Duties are estimating their percentage bodyfat by typing information in on a giant lettuce head. I say hello and they look over at me meanly.

  The world has certainly changed since I was a girl.

  At ninety-two years old people assume you’re dense. They assume you don’t remember being young and have corny moral values and can’t hear well. But oh how I remember sex with Herb, the one good man I’ve known. He played a beautiful soft guitar. We met at a fruit stand. How we experimented in his trailer before my husband Bud and his repulsive gangster friends slit his throat and dumped him off a barge into the CalSag. After killing Herb the lot of them came over to our place for dinner as usual. Oh I was beside myself. All of them had excellent appetites. Every Sunday they came. After eating they would take their shirts off and talk gangster strategy in the front room. I would do the dishes and sit on the porch in hopes they would forget about me. But invariably Bud would have me try on a dress for the group. The day he killed Herb he made me put on a cigarette-girl get-up and serve dessert out of it bending low.

  Perhaps I should have put up more of a fight but after what happened to my brother I was never one to rock the boat. He was a Wobbly and went out West, where they cut off his penis and hung him from a bridge. And did you know they shipped him back without cleaning him up one bit and my poor mother had to view the body of her only son without its penis and with such a horrible rope burn on the neck?

  She was never the same. We were continually finding dead chicks about the house.

  And that is why I moved to the city.

  That is why I moved to the city and before long was married to a man with all gold teeth, who used them to bite painful arcs into my legs. Bud was brutal through and through. A young girl gets extremely worked up on the honeymoon and the next thing she knows her new husband is scampering into the kitchen for a zucchini squash. Even through my crying he insisted, saying it would bring us closer together. Imagine the humiliation of being just eighteen and having to go to your family doctor with an infection difficult to explain. Finally he found it in a plant book. That you don’t live down. But what I’ve put up with I’ve put up with for what I thought at the time was love. What was I to do? Nowadays things may be different but in those days a woman had no place to go.

  At the eighth of the nine display cases explaining about diesels my knees give out and I sit down next to an empty popcorn box on a marble bench. At my age, every time you sit down you fall asleep. When I wake up Mitzi’s taking a photograph of me supine. She’s Mr. Spencer’s young tart. For months she’s been shopping around for a doctor willing to surgically lengthen her legs. Mr. Spencer never asks her to clean vomit. He never asks her to do anything but you-know-what in a bunk in the captured Nazi sub.

  She says: When Matt sees this shot he’ll take you down to four an hour so fast it’ll make your head spin.

  Then she goes off, practicing a sexy way of walking.

  I picture her hanging on the meathook Bud and company kept in their gangster clubhouse, then proceed down to The Wonder That Is Our Body.

  The Pickled Babies range in age from two weeks to full term. They float in green fluid in jars with black lids. Often in the Louis Pasteur Memorial Break Room we speculate on how they were obtained. I’m certain Dr. Cardilla would have had my stillborns disposed of in a Christian manner. Don’t think I haven’t
closely inspected the face of the full-term. That poor fellow barely fits in his jar and the lid has made a flat place in his head but he looks nothing like me and nothing like Bud. How I remember Bud paying off Dr. Cardilla so I could hold each of them a few minutes longer. For all his horrible faults Bud made good money. He made good money doing odd jobs for the frightening Quinn brothers, such as killing a Chinese on our back lawn. I was making dinner when I witnessed that. When Bud fell asleep I snuck outside and looked at that poor Chinese in the moonlight. One leg was pulled up and his hands were in fists. The next morning when I went out to cut lilacs he was gone. I believe Tom Quinn took him away in his milk truck.

  Of course not a cent of Bud’s money is left, because I was bilked by a nice boy claiming to be a Mormon. He’d certainly done his homework by studying the Charleston. We danced it for hours. He was no more Mormon than the man in the moon. What a fool I was. He brought his children over and I made them cookies shaped like their hands, using wax paper and a color crayon. I gave him my savings and for several months he sent me photos of a ski resort he said we owned together, and then he sent me one last photo, of himself naked atop a young woman in a steam-bath. That I feel was the cruelest part. That and a very filthy letter.

  He seemed so nice.

  As I approach the Babies I see that the vomit is the least of my worries. Six Months, Eleven Days has been knocked from his shelf. His jar is broken and a stream of formaldehyde is running towards the escalator.

  Mr. Spencer comes around the corner with a Trustee and at the top of his lungs demands to know why I’m not wearing protective gloves. For a second I think he’s being considerate of my health but then he explains to the Trustee that oil from my hands will discolor the baby and require its replacement.

  Then he says: Sometimes I think I should insist on an age cut-off, this is like working with human vegetables.

  They walk off and I think: All right for you buster.

  I do what I can for that poor little dead child, then stop by my locker for the rat poison and proceed to Our Nation’s Bounty to send another see-through cow to God.

  Our Nation’s Bounty is a far cry from a meadow. I was once a farm girl myself. When Father came in smelling of compost my sisters and I would run for the closet. He would either beat us or stroke us excessively. Still, when he died I was sad. Our Nation’s Bounty has a barn façade and a few real tractors and a stuffed farmer but they’ve located it next to Riches from the Bowels of the Earth and in my opinion cows aren’t stupid. What I mean is to say is, certainly they are stupid, but they have sound enough instincts to know that a functioning scaled-down coal mine with collegiate tour guides in hard hats is not part of any farm.

  The cow looks up at me kindly as I come in.

  I kneel down and pretend to Windex her panel. Inside there’s plenty of activity. The idea was to provide school-children insight into the digestive process of a large mammal. They claim the dyes aren’t toxic. I would think however that the flesh/Plexiglas junction must be a source of constant irritation. But compassion is not why I’ve killed six to date. I’ve killed them because I like to make Mr. Spencer sad. Because of me he’s pinned down in Cleaning, and Curation is out of the question. Because of me the see-through cow is a boondoggle and a white elephant and Spencer is a laughingstock.

  It feels good to finally be asserting oneself.

  They must put artificial flavoring in the rat poison because every cow so far has gulped it down like candy. This one does too, while whipping around its tan tail. She swallows the last of the batch, then turns her head towards the geodesic dome and begins foaming at the mouth.

  As fast as I can, which I admit isn’t very fast, I race down to the basement and take my break.

  Within the hour Mr. O’Connell the cow contractor comes in with his briefcase, looking glad. Whenever a new cow comes in, he drives it through downtown in a pickup. Lawyers and businessmen sprint down the curb, shouting sayings at it. The cows arrive disoriented and nervous, then go in for surgery.

  As he walks past he admits to no one in particular that for him the last few months have been salad days. Then he joins Mr. Spencer and they take the transparent elevator alongside the Foucault Pendulum up to where the cow is by now I would imagine lying with stiff legs. Mr. Spencer is pounding his fist into his palm and saying he suspects sabotage and Mr. O’Connell is trying hard not to look jubilant.

  I start to worry. I go down to the Fairy Castle. It’s time for the daily blizzard. Two young black men climb into the rafters to refill the bags, and the snow starts to fall. It’s so restful and nice until Mr. Spencer comes in with all nine Trustees. He holds out my last pack of poison and asks how could I, then he hastens to add that locker spot-checks are fully legal.

  He takes me by the collar and marches me out to the front door, through Photos to Bring Back Memories of a Lifetime and the Gallery of Astounding Communications. All along the way the Trustees talk in low tones about senility. We pass Mr. Jorgsen, who salutes me and starts singing the “Marseillaise.” Beneath the Flags of All Nations Mr. Spencer calls me a criminal and shoves me roughly out into the cold, and will not even allow me to fetch my coat. I walk down the umpteen stairs, my knees burning like hot coals. My ankles hurt and my piles hurt and the wind from the lake is stinging my cataracts. From the revolving door Mr. Spencer shouts that he hopes God will forgive me, and the Trustees applaud him.

  In the plain blue day is my city, the city where I lived, the city that, in my own fashion, I loved. I remember when it was made entirely of wood, and men sold goods from carts, and this museum was a floodplain where we all picnicked.

  I dodder shivering out along the cold cold pier, surrounded by staring Navy boys. The air smells of their hair tonic, and golden dead fish are bobbing in huge numbers against the chicken wire. I think of how lovely it all could have been had anything gone right, and then I think: Oh heavens, why prolong it, I’ve no income now.

  I step off the pier, followed by nine or ten of the Navy boys, who want to save me, and do, and will not stop saving me although I beg and beg and beg. They deposit me on the frozen sand and cover me with their coats, and walk around patting each other on the back and shouting with triumph.

  One has a radio and they begin to dance.

  BOUNTY

  Tonight at last the nation votes. In defiance of top management Father Oswald’s set up his shortwave in the Rec Center. He says no matter how the vote turns out we’ve got to buck up. He says no matter what happens we’ve been blessed. Though it’s true, he admits, that our burdens are considerable crosses to bear, we still get three squares a day, not to mention a nice chunk of change to take home and mull over in the privacy and security of a bunkhouse for which we pay zippo rent.

  We try to go through our regular Counseling agenda. We talk about ways in which we feel neglected or trampled underfoot. We pair off and exchange neckrubs while praising one another for being so unique. Then Father leads us in cheerful songs from musicals. But nobody can concentrate. Finally he gives in and turns on the news: Poll riots in Cleveland and three Flaweds lynched outside Topeka. The early returns are discouraging. The Western vote will decide it. Out there genetic purity is highly valued and Flaweds are generally considered subhuman trash, so things look bleak.

  Father gathers us around him in a circle and encourages us to visualize losing so that when we actually do it won’t hurt so much. Then he chucks each of us on the temple and says he’s proud of our restraint.

  By midnight it’s clear we’ve lost. In spite of our Preemptive Visualization we’re devastated. Beatrice Connally falls on the floor weeping. She’s forty-two and sees the vote as a death knell for her baby hopes. Her wig goes askew and we can all see her huge scalp veins.

  Father climbs up on a folding chair and gives us his The World Has Changed But Not Christ speech. He reminds us that what tortures us is desire. He suggests we take what comes and avail ourselves of the beauties present even in our reduced circumstances. I
nstead of having children, he says, plant and savor flowers. Instead of owning property, say a kind word to a neighbor with poor self-esteem.

  “Bear in mind,” he says, “that in time you meek shall inherit the earth.”

  “How can you possibly believe that line at a time like this?” Beatrice says from the floor, as several of her cronies hustle to get her wig back on.

  “It is at times like these,” he says, “that I believe most firmly.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Beatrice says. “You’re Normal.”

  “He’s not normal,” someone says. “He’s a priest.”

  “No need for personal invective,” Father says. “Although certainly I understand your frustrations.”

  Allan Burns makes a farting noise with his mouth from the back of the room. Allan’s a cynical rebel with benign polyps all over his torso. He’s nobody’s favorite. Even sans polyps he’d be a pariah.

  “In the best interests of all,” Father says, seeming to enjoy ignoring Allan, “I suggest we go about our business as usual, observing the regular and sanctioned coping rituals.”

  The rest of us agree.

  So he goes into the safe for our vials and we all toot up.

  Later that night in the Castle 4 courtyard Bill Tiney’s screaming at a group of Clients for letting his son die of cholera. Little Scotty Tiney’s lying motionless on a wooden cart near the goat-udder bagpipist. He’s not really dead, he’s Performing. Makeup’s done a super job of making him look decayed. The Clients titter and check their Events Schedules and a few who are really in the spirit of the thing start laying coins on Scotty’s chest. I’m slated for Ribald Highwayman. When the Tineys are through I’m supposed to bound in and rob the women of the fake jewelry they received at Admission, while comically ogling their cleavages.

  Just then Connie comes up the trail with Mr. Corbett. I duck into a fake shrub. Connie’s my sister. Corbett’s a gigantic bachelor who made his fortune in antiseptic swabs.