The camera zoomed in on a small figure climbing the statue. John had attached magnetic devices to each of the four stumps that used to be his arms and legs.
��possibly some form of peace protest or a publicity stunt,� the news reporter was saying live! on the scene! But they weren�t treating it like a publicity stunt. Troops from New York and New Jersey had converged upon the island while helicopters circled and an occasional jet formation cut through the top of the shot.
Another zoom and a focus. John had made it to the torch, and when he did, the statue exploded. It engulfed a helicopter�New Jersey�s, it seemed. The right arm of the statue fell intact, crushed a fleeing New York platoon. When some of the dust cleared, the troops were killing each other live! on the scene!
I wanted to preserve this moment, to mourn the death of my co-worker, my friend. I wanted to absorb the confusion, the chaos, the pain, to feel solemn and honored while I witnessed his end, to remember the dignity of these moments that most of his life had lacked. But it was soon too late; the studio had cut to the videotape! a dozen, a hundred, one million times, and if I had cried the first time and laughed the tenth, I had washed a dish the sixtieth and picked my nose on the thousandth explosion. By the time I turned off the television, John�s death was just as meaningless as the civil war, the genocide, or the job we had shared, but by now John had opted out of all of these, while I was still stuck with all three. And I envied him.
Corporate Torsos Need Not Apply
A fairy tale. By Jessica R Pomerantz.
1.
Alice put down her pen, grabbed her gas can and her matches, and went outside to go set her self on fire.
A long time ago, before the flood, America was quite a different place than it is today. Well, the whole world was different, geographically speaking, but it wasn�t much different otherwise. The rest of the world will always be the rest of the world. America was really different. There was no Bureau of Science Factology to disseminate important information to the American people. The very government itself was a mass of frenzied opposing forces, neutralizing each other and getting virtually nothing done by way of governance. And there was still a document called the Constitution, an abscess on the face of this teenage country, stunting its political growth and repressing the people, preventing them from experiencing true security and true freedom.
Luckily, a group of wise men, eleven wise men, eleven politicians, senators of the United States of America, saw the folly in these ways of non-cooperation. They had a vision, a collective vision of a new form of government�a governing body comprised of men who shut up and worked together to creatively solve problems rather than disagreeing all the time. These men created a coalition, a secret union among their eleven states to stand and liberate their country from the paralysis of dissent. And they passed this new enlightened system down to their sons, who in turn left the inheritance to their sons, creating stability (and personal profit) for generations and generations, until finally a crop of eleven came along who were a genuine bunch of fumbling idiots.
And they very nearly ruined the whole thing.
Bob woke up at five in the morning, punching the air as usual, lying flat on his back and swinging his fist at nothing. He always woke up this way. Fighting. But he didn�t always wake up to a voice on the answering machine saying, �Bob! Bob!� even after he had specifically asked then all to call him Robert for pride amplification purposes. Bob rolled over onto his stomach, waited for the sloshing of the waterbed to subside, turned over again onto his back, and then managed to reach the phone. He always picked the phone up to talk, never used speakerphone, out of a perceived fear that his condominium might be bugged. The political sophistication it took to suspect the phone itself was tapped would not come until later on in Bob�s career.
There is a special sort of men out there, men who do not need index cards or teleprompters to give speeches, men who do not worriedly examine their hairlines in the mirror every day, several times, men whose suits do not wrinkle, even the flappy part of the coat-jacket in back. Bob dreamed all his life about being one of those men. But the chronic spontaneous nosebleeds worked against any true degree of self-assuredness in public, and Robert, Bob, was doomed to be a press secretary, a handmaiden to eleven senators even less able than himself. He watched his hairline retreat every morning, and he resigned himself to his work without much enthusiasm until the untimely death of Sen. Tom Fletch (R-NJ) and the subsequent appearance of Alex Smith. Only then did he really start to wake up in the morning.
�Bob!� It was Sen. Sam Finch (D-NY), Bob realized.
�What?� It was how Bob always answered the phone. It was how Bob responded to most anything. The waterbed, a very poor idea, as men are meant to sleep on land rather than any of those other elements�fire, air, or water�shifted on its own a little bit and Bob�s under-used legs sailed up towards the ceiling.
�Tom Fletch is dead,� Sam said.
�What?� This one was for incredulity.
�Tom Fletch overdosed on cocaine and died!�
�What!� This one was for denial. Bob tried to sit up, but he just sank in a little further, mounds of water rising.
�We�re all here, at the Regency North. We don�t know what to do!� Sam sounded like he was on the verge of a whimper. Bob wanted to climb inside his waterbed, drown and die. Instead, he said, �I�ll be right there,� very calmly, as if he could see the future. He hung up the phone; he rolled off the bed and looked at the carpet for a little while.
And that was it. He had adjusted to this new information. He stood up to go get dressed, because humans adapt. It�s just what they do.
When Alice was one or two years old, she woke up on a Saturday morning and waddled over to her apartment�s balcony. Her curls had reached simply unmanageable proportions, due to a sizeable jump in humidity overnight. Alice pressed her face up against the sliding glass door and giggled.
Her uncle spanked her later that day. �It�s a tragedy,� he had said, stern-faced, frown lines ganging up. �It�s not to be laughed at. People are dead.� But because he had waited too long, Alice never came to associate laughing at tragedies with the shame and pain of a spanking; instead she came to associate her uncle with unnecessary oppression and just plain acting like an asshole. Not to mention the freeloading off his sister�her mother.
When Alice looked outside through the porch door, she saw the housing development across the way, but beyond that the familiar landmarks were gone, replaced over night by the Atlantic Ocean. Alice�s apartment building in Trenton, New Jersey had formerly been located a full forty-five minutes� drive from the nearest beach. Now it was beachfront property, several blocks away.
In the twenty years or so leading up to the flood, humans had been busy debating whether or not it was getting hotter out, or was that just August rolling around again? If it really was hotter, was that toxic chemicals� fault, or was it just the earth doing its normal periods of heating and cooling thing? Nobody quite knew the answers to these questions. There were bouts of arguing and some minor fisticuffs, but for the most part everyone stayed calm and continued doing whatever they had been doing before a possible heating of the earth was identified.
Environmentalists conceived of several possible options, of which the earth would choose one in the future:
1. Everything�s fine. There is no global warming. Humans will only have to suffer the normal catastrophes�earthquakes, mudslides, fire, drought, and the like.
2. Global warming exists, but it�s a natural phenomenon. Cycles of heating and cooling are nothing to scoff at, but we can adjust by manufacturing more tank tops and fans. No need to panic.
3. Global warming not only exists, but it has been aggravated by toxic chemicals that will continue to affect our atmosphere years after we end their use, which doesn�t seem to be coming up soon anyhow. Although cycles of heating and cooling are normal, the average temperatures have been steadily increasing at a rate that may be called alarming since the chemical impact of humans on the planet began.
There were two global warming scenarios:
a. The ice caps will partially melt. Ice will slide down from the poles, reflect a large amount of sunlight, thus slowly lowering earth�s temperature and sending the planet into a gradual ice age.
b. The ice caps will partially melt. The oceans will rise several inches over a period of many decades, or centuries, even. Weather will become more tropical, a bit more violent and haphazard, but overall nothing to slit one�s wrists over. Might not want to purchase an island for long-term retirement plans.
Scientists omitted one geophysical law: nature can do anything if it really puts its mind to it. An earthquake can destroy a city in one day. A virus can ravage a human body in one day. The magnetic poles of the earth can shift in one day. Overnight, the earth seemed to hit some sort of critical mass, and all at once the oceans rose up over the land. Islands disappeared; the rest of the world underwent a night of shrinking. But more alarming for the Americans in particular was the loss of bits of America. New York City, Washington D.C., most of New Jersey (but nobody really cared about that except for the New Jerseyans), Florida, the coast of California, all these names and more�all gone overnight. Great tidal waves swept in on people sleeping, people watching television, people eating midnight snacks, people staring at themselves in the mirror, people yelling at their agents, or their loved ones, or both at the same time.
Alice�s mom said they�d better not get too comfortable with the new ocean view. Alice pooped in her pants. Alice�s mom said all those people who used to have beachfront property would probably still want to have beachfront property like they did before, and some legal crap would probably force them�Alice, her mom, and her mom�s asshole mooch of a brother�to move forty-five minutes inland to accommodate the rich beach-owners and make everything like it was before. Alice�s mom ran through this train of thought standing on the balcony, enjoying a sunny day above the new beach, while Alice�s uncle took up chain-smoking cigarettes and then flicking them into the ocean.
�Those sons of bitches�ll force us into Pennsylvania,� Alice�s mom said. �Acts of God don�t stop rich people from getting what they want.� A cigarette butt sailed an arc across the sky, fell in with some confused marine life. Alice saw a wave take it under.
Nobody ever wound up trying to relocate Alice and her family, because luckily they were all dead. Alice saw a seagull land on the roof of the apartments across the way, watched the ocean rippling around it. She laughed again.
How could the ocean ever be a tragedy?
Alice stood in a room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She watched some red soupy fluid drain out of her mom�s lung through an opaque plastic tube.
�You�d make a good doctor,� Alice�s mom said.
Plastics, Alice thought. Currently, she was a good nothing. She had received an answering machine message several months prior. Alice�s mom was suffering a nasty bout with the flu. Her doctor prescribed her some pills that disturbed the efficacy of her insulin for the Type Two Diabetes that she had contracted when she was pregnant with Alice, twenty-one years ago.
Gestational diabetes is a power struggle between a mother and her greedy, gluttonous fetus. There are all kinds of laws for the benefit of a fetus but virtually none that protect a mother. Gestational diabetes develops when the fetus demands higher quality nutrition, sending glucose levels higher and higher until they become unmanageable and the pancreas loses hope, becomes depressed. Alice�s mom injected herself with a needle full of insulin twice a day because of Alice�s sweet tooth. Alice continued to maintain that sweet tooth even after she was done being a fetus and had advanced into adulthood. If one can call twenty-one years of age adulthood. Which it isn�t, so you can�t.
So Alice�s mom�s diabetes was Alice�s fault. The events to follow may or may not be considered blameless, in which Alice�s mom contracted a flu, leading to some prescribed medication that interfered with insulin, producing ketoacidosis, a condition explained to Alice as �diabetic meltdown,� causing a hospitalization, a CAT scan, and the discovery of a golf-ball-sized tumor in Alice�s mom left lung�the golf ball itself being a ready-made analogy for the doctor alone, not for Alice or her mom. The golf ball is, it turns out, undesirable in a human lung as a size for a tumor. One would prefer a grape, a pea, a hangnail�perhaps a deer tick. Golf ball means malignant deadly cancer, in this case. Ninety-nine percent certain cancer. The problem at this point wasn�t the diabetes or even the ketoacidosis. That latter bit had settled, according to the experts, from a meltdown into a meltsideways or just heat up and sag or droop a little bit. At this point the meltdown was the golf ball.
Alice took all this in while sitting on her dorm room bed, listening to the answering machine digital recording relay all of this new information. Before the day was out, Alice�s stomach wouldn�t digest food.
Alice dropped out of school within the week, packed her things into her car, and drove for thirty-six hours, leaving behind the blue skies and low humidity of Albuquerque for the hospitals and other assorted medical facilities of the New Jersey�Pennsylvania area.
Have you ever tried to drive yourself home from lung surgery?
Plastics, Alice thought again. The red soupy liquid slowed itself down, reversed maybe, maybe went back into the lung. Got confused. Alice was confused about how a big gaping wound in her mother�s chest with a big plastic tube sticking out of it was considered medicinal. But Alice was a nothing at this point�not even a college student. So nobody considered her opinion, and when the nurse came in and told her to leave while she yanked the tube, Alice did even though she wanted to watch. She went two floors down to eat some lunch. The florescent lights hummed. A man and a woman behind the counter argued over the amount of tortellini she would get as Alice wondered how many people were dying at that exact moment and if her mom was one of them. And the woman was right�it was too much. Alice was sick of eating it halfway through. In the hospital, everyone looked professional. Even the food service personnel seemed to be wearing lab coats. A doctor at the table next to her was saying, �Did you have a good teacher that made you want to be a teacher?� He wasn�t talking to Alice. Doctor�hell, he could have worked in food service for all she knew. She just shoved in more tortellini, and she wasn�t hungry. She wasn�t hungry at all.
At about five a.m., instead of making the tedious commute to his office, Bob made the tedious commute to his own little hell. In a lovely suite at the Regency, Senator Tom Fletch was face down in a healthy-sized pile of cocaine. A couple of prostitutes were milling about along with the ten other senators who had been about to constitute the supreme overlords of America under Bob�s careful direction until Tom Fletch and his pure idiocy became a large part of everyone�s political careers on this fine morning.
Things Alice�s mom survived:
1. Being born and raised in upstate New York.
2. Being in the passenger seat of a car that was driven into a house. Sustained injuries: broken collarbone, broken right arm, broken pelvis, ruptured spleen and subsequent depression from lying in a hospital for a month or so, unvisited, leading to
3. Being thrown in a mental institution. Also recall
4. Living without a spleen.
5. Losing half a thyroid to cancer.
6. One caesarean section of a very premature baby, who had, don�t forget, given her mother
7. Gestational diabetes that never went away.
8. Moving to New Jersey.
9. Living in New Jersey.
10. Working in social services, in New Jersey, of all places. (These are in no particular order.)
11. Ovarian cysts.
12. Diabetic ketoacidosis.
13. A golf-ball-sized lung tumor, which turned out to be completely benign and not malignant as had been previously believed by all parties involved including Alice�s mom thanks to some medical personnel who had indicated a certain certainty regarding the matter.
Things Alice�s mom did not survive:
1. Lung tumor surgery, or rather, the resulting infection.
This list often only gets a single item. Alice left the hospital and went home.
Bob stared at his hands a little while. Then he looked at his idiot dream team, ten little wind up toys bumping into walls of stupidity over and over. The eleventh one was deceased. Bob wished he was dead too. Bob wondered if he should just throw in the puppet master towel now and settle into a comforting job in marketing, or maybe lobbying. Bob could eat lunch with the best of them. He was a mean lunch-eater. He, too, could eat lunch in an influential way�of this he was certain.
The ten were scattered about the room. Virginia was picking his teeth with a business card while New York (Sen. Sam Finch) was testing the potency of the cocaine by rubbing it on his gums with a picky finger. Connecticut was talking to one of the whores about her fee-for-service schedule. Rhode Island had turned on the television and started flipping through hundreds of channels. Maryland was trying to figure out the coffee maker after Bob had told him room service would be a lousy idea, what with the corpse in the room and all. Delaware was spending a long time in the bathroom on what was most likely a bowel movement. Massachusetts was playing blackjack on his cellular phone, betting real money via a wireless Internet casino connection; he had lost several hundred dollars in the last thirty seconds. Vermont and New Hampshire were staring listlessly out the balcony window. Pennsylvania was picking his nose. And New Jersey was dead in a scandalous way, which was why they were all assembled here in a hotel suite at six in the morning. Sixteen minutes had elapsed since Bob had said, we can�t leave here until we figure out how to handle this, prompting all ten freakishly dumb senators to lose interest almost immediately, which wasn�t uncommon when any mental exercise was at hand.
For the first time since its inception hundreds of years ago, the bloc was threatened. If an outsider replaced New Jersey, all Bob�s careful work, and the delicate positioning of many years of powerful corporate political families would be laid to waste, thanks to one big fat line up the nose of Sen. Tom Fletch (R-NJ), the proud new owner of a fatal heart attack.
Shit.
Become completely reckless. Light some incense on some towels and then leave the house all day just to see how flame retardant things really are. Quit wearing a seat belt in hope of a fatal car accident. Ignore the bank, ignore the mortgage people�don�t even fill them in on what has happened. You don�t owe them anything. Except thousands and thousands of dollars. Wait for a circus to come to town and then join it. Become one of those clowns. Paint teardrops below your eyes in a ridiculous shade of unnatural blue and really mean it. Cash in the life insurance policy and escape to exotic lands. Except there isn�t one, isn�t any policy, no money at all.
Spin wildly out of control, Alice, because death hasn�t been a part of your life until now, and now you are so ill-equipped to deal with it, almost too old to adapt to such a change�rigid, fixed, even at twenty-one, ensconced in the comfort of the material, of consumer electronics or of flesh, the flesh of the person who grew you in her uterus, flesh that rots, decomposes and grows things on it, like a fucking dairy product. Get outraged, outraged at the ephemeral nature of life.
Alice�s mom was dead, and Alice didn�t know what to do. She took the college loan money she had saved and spent it on a burial. This can be condensed into a single sentence, but a burial is an enormous bureaucratic mess. It�s illegal to throw someone into a trash bag, even a heavy-duty trash bag with drawstrings, and set them in the trash can for pickup on early Thursday morning. Likewise, it�s illegal to bury your loved ones in your backyard, even if you own that backyard. Your property rights don�t include the right to keep a corpse there, wedged in between the earthworms, and public lands�? Forget about it.
Forget about burying your dead mom in back of your apartment complex, or�sorry�condominiums, not apartments. Condominiums are so much nicer, and you can even own your condominium, can pay a mortgage on that piece of shit for years and years�it can outlive you. It can grow deadly mold in the depths of its collective basement with apportioned storage units and you can speculate on the link between deadly mold and lung tumors even as you write out the check for the mortgage, because you can multi-task. But because multitasking allows for the performance of many functions at the expense of the quality of all of them, perhaps you won�t draw any conclusions as to the impact of the condominium�s mold problem on lung tumor generation, and maybe you will spell the word forty with a u, like this: fourty, although that�s clearly the wrong way to spell it. Mom can�t go next to the dead chinchilla next to all those strangers� kids pets (�God rest Charles Mingus� mummified chinchilla soul inside that cordless telephone box with his alfalfa packed for the afterlife�), thirteen paces at a ninety-degree angle from the concrete slab out behind the complex, directionally slightly closer to Society Hill II than Society Hill I.
Getting rid of Alice�s mom�s dead body had taken quite a bit of mental effort, money and decision-making, and if a survivor is grieved and traumatized at the beginning of such a process, getting rid of a corpse, at the end the survivor might feel more than mildly annoyed at the dead person for putting such a stress as the proper removal and disposal of a body on her shoulders. Leaving a body to decompose in the earth is illegal and very punishable by law. The proper way to do it is to pay someone to pump the body full of chemicals, chemicals more likely than not related to those chemicals that caused the person�s death in the first place, and then the body can be placed safely in the ground at a pre-purchased designated location with all the other dead chemical-receptacles in boxes, possibly with pillows and other articles of comfort�the dead person�s watch, so he knows when to take his pills, the dead person�s necklace, so she looks pretty for her rotting date, the dead person�s ring, so he remembers he�s married to some live person somewhere and doesn�t accidentally have an affair with one of the other decomposing bodies although, truth be told, death is when we part.
Resting in peace just isn�t an option anymore. Alice�s mom, like all the other dead bodies, would have to meet her maker�if by maker one was referring to earthworms, those eternal creators�in as garish a fashion as she had lived her life, with all manner of unnecessary appliance. For some reason civilization had taken a simple thing like dying and turned it into one big fucking fiasco.
Alice saw this fiasco to its logical conclusion�an emptying of her bank account and the lowering of her mom into the ground. Then she got a job so she could take over the mortgage payments. It was a tradition in Alice�s family, one of the few traditions her people had left: pay the mortgage and die. So Alice set to it. She got a job at a call center, doing telephone surveys.
Alice�s mom�s ghost began haunting the condominium a couple of weeks later.
It is an unfortunate man who takes pleasure in the flight of a bird, in the swinging tree branches with fluttering leaves, in an apple�s muted reflection of sunlight, in a lake�s surface draped in mist at early dawn, because beauty is fleeting, but Styrofoam lasts forever. Bob threw his coffee cup into the hotel room�s tiny little garbage can with a certain measure of exasperation. Disposing of Tom wasn�t the problem, coke and whores weren�t the problem�the body would be easily carried out upon a phone call�no more Tom; simple, and the coke and the whores would disappear, all of them. The publicity wasn�t about to become an issue, because Tom�s death had been brought about by a tragic heart attack (�and with two small children at home�how sad!) while jogging, Bob had already decided.
But once Tom�s death was public knowledge, what then? Who would replace him? Could they initiate an outsider into the fray? At this late stage would it even be possible to find a man dumb enough to play the part without causing too much trouble? If they divulged the whole of the situation to some turncoat who ran to The Times to spill the conspiracy theory, how easy would it be to kill that man and discredit him? Or discredit him and then kill him? What would they do about Tom�s corporation? Could they find someone who looked like Tom and brainwash him to think he was Tom? What about the possibility of robotizing Tom�s corpse into a kind of dead robot Tom and just trotting him out onto the Senate floor on special voting occasions? How many people really knew what Tom looked like anyway?
As Bob was brainstorming solutions, a man walked in the door.
That�s right.
While Bob was concocting an escape recipe among so much disaster, an actual man walked in the hotel room�s completely unlocked door.
A stranger. A man Bob had never seen before. Ten senators and two whores looked up. Bob�s head screamed kill him! Kill him now! But Bob�s head clearly didn�t understand that Bob didn�t carry any kind of a weapon on his person, didn�t even own a gun or a sword or anything.
A man walked in the door.
�I�m Alex Smith,� the man said.
2.
Two weeks later, Bob was trying out for a tuna fish commercial. Down on his hands and knees, his tie scraping the plywood stage, nibbling on the toe of a 450-pound man dressed as a tuna fish, Bob began to realize he was no longer in control of things.
�Mmmmmm,� Bob said, or rather, read from a teleprompter.
�Now the ankle!� A man in a polo shirt said, smacking a clipboard on the side of his leg. Polo shirt man; this was his tuna fish commercial talent-scouting effort. Bob moved his mouth up to the large tuna fish gentleman�s ankle. Because this was merely a try-out and not the real thing, the actor playing the tuna fish was not fully embodying a tuna fish. He was wearing a fiberglass tuna fish head and a pair of swimming trunks to give at least a partial tuna fish effect, so as to facilitate�no, inspire better acting on the part of the actor playing the would-be tuna fish consumer, who in this case, was Bob. Bob wasn�t really enjoying the gnawing, and although it might have been slightly better, again for reasons of pride, to not be chewing on a man�s ankle, he wouldn�t have enjoyed eating actual tuna fish so much, either. Advertising is just one more industry based on absolute fraud.
�Don�t nibble! No more nibbling! Gnaw! I want you to gnaw goddamit! Are you afraid to gnaw? No actor who is afraid to gnaw on a fat man�s ankle will ever make it in this business! Gnaw!� The man in the polo shirt emphasized the gnawing, so Bob gnawed. Alex Smith looked on. And this is how they had arrived at that moment in time, that awkward, gnawing moment in time:
Alex Smith sailed into their suite at the Regency two weeks previously, oozing of confidence. He announced himself.
�I�m Alex Smith.� Some stared, some gawked, and some continued to gamble on his cellular phone, but not one man or prostitute made any pronounced move. �I�m Mr. Fletch�s assistant.�
�Bob,� Bob said. �Bob Petri.� He shook this Alex Smith�s hand, trying to transmit a current of death down his arm, through his hand, and into Alex Smith�s body, based on an instinct he had. He failed and failed again. This Mr. Smith possessed a few characteristics that Bob didn�t appreciate so much right off the bat. His hair looked firmly planted in his scalp. His palms were not perpetually clammy. He didn�t appear to have a nervous tic below his left eye. Or above his right.
�Mr. Fletch�s death is untimely and unfortunate, but not completely unanticipated by either Mr. Fletch or myself, I�m afraid. He�s had this difficulty for quite some time.� His words didn�t become mangled when they tried to come out of his mouth. The senators weren�t ignoring him. His suit fit well around his waist. He did not appear to be sweating at all. The whites of his eyes were not bloodshot�they gleamed, crystal clear.
Bob felt a little drip of blood start down his nose and head for his lip. Alex Smith offered his handkerchief. Bob felt a little seed of hate plant in his internal organs�not just in his heart but all over�one in the gall bladder next to the bile, one in the prostate next to the cancer, one in the appendix next to whatever it is that lives in appendices, one in every overactive sweat gland, soaking his suit jacket. Bob knew a shift had begun.
The best minds of Alice�s generation didn�t have the happy fortune of being destroyed by madness. They were too busy being exploited. Advertisements on the insides of their cribs made them feel incomplete before they could speak, and their only exposure to the concept of a higher power came from that spot on the dollar where it says, In God We Trust. But much like those dollars, no one ever managed to hold on to God. Instead their higher powers came in the form of anti-depressant, anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety pills, pills, pills. But not for Alice, because she didn�t have any health insurance, so she couldn�t afford an ailment. She was forced to absorb her depression-psychosis-anxiety and call it her personality. She couldn�t afford anything, especially not an extended period of grief over the loss of her sole living parent and caring blood relation, because mortgages and other assorted price-of-being-alive-and-sheltered expenses don�t respond to that sort of thing.
Alice found herself in a former factory-turned-office building slightly closer to the heart of Trenton than the confines of her newly received condominium. From nine in the morning until nine at night she sat in a cubicle slightly larger than a human, in a chair, staring at a computer screen�a terminal. There were no diversions at the terminal so as to hamper productivity, no Internet and no email, no sending someone a note on fractals (a self-similar portion of the whole! infinite detail throughout!) or the position of the planets. There was only the screen and the survey and data entry capabilities and the little walls, gray.
Ever since the flood it had become markedly important for corporations to keep better track of their employees� whereabouts at all times�you know, for safety purposes. So at the bottom of the cubicle a small titanium cuff�adjustable, mind you, not inhumane�would hook around Alice�s left ankle. So all employees could be accounted for at all times. For safety. A small sensor in the cuff let on to the central security system that she was in that cubicle. At all times. Except for scheduled bathroom breaks. And the thirty-minute unpaid lunch, eaten in designated areas. It would be a liability otherwise. People could get hurt by another apocalyptic catastrophe if they weren�t secured in a known location.
Alice was located in the call center on the third floor of Market, Research, Incorporated. The creators of Market, Research, Incorporated screwed up in those natal stages and named it as if it was a legal firm, with commas in between each individual word. Like Market and Research and Incorporated were all partners in the company. Then nobody bothered to change it, on grounds that it would cost too much and it�s really only that one comma that�s causing the problem. Plus, most people don�t have an eye for details, including corporate clients. And it wouldn�t have mattered to Alice, either, if she hadn�t attended college as a proxy English major when she was a fetus in her mother�s womb, giving her an innate editing ability that drove her somewhat mad. So actually it irritated her quite a bit to represent such an institution, but at the time she had strode through the front entrance of Market, Research, Incorporated she hadn�t possessed the financial freedom to turn down a job based on reasons of punctuation.
Alice had been less mentally balanced during earlier interviews for other jobs, so it had taken some time for her to acquire the market research position.
�It says here you were double-majoring in political science and economics with a minor in psychology. Why?� Alice�s interviewer, a wisp of a man with a doorstopper of a nose�rivaling Alice�s own George Washington profile�leaned in over the desk. Alice had learned a little too late that this job entailed door-to-door knife sales. Kitchen knives. For cutting food items. She had been suckered by the false promise of a high hourly wage.
�I wanted to understand how people work. What makes the brain tick. Why things are the way they are.�
�So do you?� This knife salesman, Alice felt certain, was not only not going to hire her, but he was also going to try and sell her a knife.
�Yep.�
�Would you like to explain it?�
�Well, basically mankind is addicted to the analgesic effects of cereals and domesticated animal milks. Our entire global civilization is based on the manufacture and abuse of painkillers.�
�Right. I don�t think this job is for you.�
What did he want? Alice thought. An answer based on knife sales?
�Excellent,� she said. She took a box of kitchen matches out of her bag, usually reserved for lighting her elderly stove, and she set her r�sum� on fire there on the edge of his mahogany desk. She didn�t want to leave any trace of herself in there.
Probably made from a Belizean tree, she thought. Maybe not real mahogany. Maybe just a logwood with some red dust on it. She walked away from that interview, or rather, was escorted out. The knife salesmen were good enough to drop the charges.
Her interview to assist some assistants at the local Trenton paper went slightly better than the knife interview; Alice may have been saning up as her grief was transformed into financial fear.
�Name one experience in your life that had an impact on your ability to make decisions,� the assistant assistant editor said. His tie was lavender. She stared at it a little absent-mindedly.
Your tie, Alice thought. She thought about telling him the story of her deeply spiritual acid trip when she was sixteen. Then she thought better of it. Then she thought of going down into the street, standing up on a crate, gathering all the malcontents and yelling, this society has nothing to offer us! Follow me to freedom! Then she could just walk down the street until she found an ice cream place and go order a hot fudge sundae with multiple ice cream flavors or something. Then she realized her interviewer had been watching her for an upwards of ten minutes while she soundlessly mouthed words to match this internal movie she�d been creating.
She told him about the time she lied and said she�d fallen and broken her ankle when she hadn�t fallen at all but it turned out to be broken anyway and how she had thought then�at eleven years of age�that she could make lies come true through willpower. She still sort of believed that.
He didn�t seem impressed. He seemed sweaty. After all, it was summer. He said they�d call her, but he lied, and his lie didn�t come true. He was not a man of his word. Alice fell into market research about a month later. It was a career move of the damned.
And, speaking of damned, while Alice�s mom had been a hell of a woman in life, in death she was a bit of a burden. Alice�s mom had been a good mom. When Alice developed an affinity for Charles Bukowski, Alice�s mom kept an eye out for his persistently published posthumous works. When Alice developed a sense of irony, Alice�s mom brought home a mug that said SLAVE on it in brown block lettering�a thrift store find. When Alice decided to quit the violin in favor of the guitar, Alice�s mom accommodated the switch. When Alice turned vegetarian, Alice�s mom became intimately aware of tofu and its many versatile uses. Alice�s mom was no slouch, and she never seemed to hold a grudge about the gestational diabetes. In life. In death, Alice�s mom�never a living smoker�took up ghostly smoking, so that clouds of stale-smelling ghost smoke hung about the house nearly all the time. Alice�s mom�s ghost kept strange hours and hounded Alice about the mortgage among other things.
When Alice�s mom�s ghost inhaled, Alice saw the ghost smoke move into Alice�s mom�s ghost lungs and leave a little spot of ghost tar. Was it possible to die again after you were dead, of dead person�s lung cancer? How did the ghost smoking work, really? Were there ghost lawsuits and ghost lawyers and ghost public service announcements? Was there never any peace or rest and relaxation, ever? Were there ghost tobacco companies working day and night on ghost marketing of ghost cigarettes? Alice didn�t talk to her new ghost mom about any of these things. While she had felt quite comfortable talking to her mom as an ethereal body, in a hypothetical way after her death, when Alice�s mom�s ghost showed up, much changed by death, very different from her living self, Alice just didn�t feel like shooting the shit anymore now that her mom, or her mom�s weirdo ghost, was able to concretely answer back. It just wasn�t the same. It detracted from the great loss and void and mystery of death when Alice�s mom�s ghost told Alice to get her damn feet off the coffee table, something Alice�s alive mom never ever would have said. Death had made Alice�s mom into way more of a materialist, maybe because she wasn�t made out of matter anymore, so she coveted all the things that were�even the stupid lousy coffee table. Alice tried hard not to resent her ghost mom.
Bob tried hard not to resent Alex Smith. But once he started, he turned it into his religion. He chanted and lit candles about it and made up hate dances and dreamed hateful dreams. But maybe he was in love. It�s hard to say, because those two concepts, love and hate, are marked by such similar behavior. So maybe Bob was in love with Alex Smith for being the man he wasn�t, for pulling things together, for appearing on the scene out of nowhere, literally nowhere, and saving them from their own stupidity. But maybe Bob was in hate for all these same reasons.
Bob was glowering at one end of a boardroom table. Alex Smith was standing at the front of a conference room, a tasteful little number done up like a glass coffin. Very modern. Ten senators were seated around the glass table in the glass chairs. The eleventh individual was a minor actor Alex Smith had recruited from a tuna fish commercial try-out to be the interim Senator of New Jersey, as a replacement for the unfortunate cocaine addict and former Senator of New Jersey, Tom Fletch.
Bob didn�t even know Fletch was into blow. That�s how far out of the loop Bob had been. While he had been busting his ass trying to make something out of this stupid little bloc of politi-corp power, they were busy screwing up and not telling him about it. This was the thanks he got. So now he was stuck with this outsider, Alex Smith. Hyper-intelligent, charismatic, nice suit owning, full head of hair having, perfect attention commanding Alex Smith. Our hero, Alex Smith.
�Digital broadcasting allows specific things to be aired on specific televisions. Gentlemen, consider this election already won.�
A round of applause went up in the boardroom. Alex Smith�s perfect hair shook ever so slightly in the Freon breeze of the air conditioning. He beamed.
The problem with media experiences and with entertainment in general is that it all stands in such sharp contrast to the rest of life. In movies, there�s always some noble purpose to serve, or some interesting bit of violence to occur in a highly edited way, or everyone is always saying funny things all the time, and there are always so many people around in movies�people as far as the eye can see�interacting, no less.
When will the multimedia outlets of expression catch up to the now? Why do all the video games have ascending levels when there is nothing to match that in real life? It�s just cruel to condition people to react to situations that may never happen. To make reality less of a shock for today�s young people, in the future video games will have only one level, or perhaps several, but the gamer will be arbitrarily pigeonholed at some randomly selected level, and although one�s behavior may seem like it deserves points, none will be assigned at all. Or sometimes there will be points and sometimes not, but the points will obey no visible rules as to their coming and going. Sometimes you will just lose and lose and nothing you do will be able to prevent that. And there is no dying. Or, there�s dying but then no starting over. There will just be that blank screen forever and ever, and you can�t play the game again�it�s a one shot deal, and if you don�t make it, oh, too bad.
And movies, instead of the conflict and resolution format, they�ll be steady state for long periods to represent the dullness of most lives. The hero does not save the day, the hero does not get the girl, the hero does not retort wittily. The hero sits on the couch eating hydrogenated (partially�never fully) snack foods and watching television. For two hours. The end. Cut to credits. Much better.
Entertainment�s departure from reality has made it so that people crave�what? Adventure? Excitement? Emotional outbursts? Or more entertainment, constant entertainment, the distraction of television on a car�s dashboard, at the gas pump, at home, in the shower, in all the restaurants, at all the bars, during a haircut, everywhere, everywhere, never stop, hypnotize us, all the time, all the time, make us forget, make us feel emotions we otherwise wouldn�t, produce a response that validates our ownership of all these neurons and brain chemicals because somehow, somehow, life just doesn�t do that anymore, not at all.
In the future, books will not involve the protagonist and the antagonist (or both in one! two birds! one stone!) and there will be no plot. It will just be a loose collection of grouped sentences, and humans�characters�will drift in and out, but they will never talk to each other; they will avoid eye contact most of the time and rush past each other hurriedly in their cars, alone all the time, and they especially will not form emotional connections. If the movies looked more like what our lives have become, if the books described what we do with ourselves, to ourselves, if the video games mirrored reality, maybe then we could do something better with our lives, ourselves, our reality, instead of just watching and listening to and reading about fake people all the time and caring so much about them while we rot, our lives atrophy, unused, we become less apt at doing things and more adept at idly sitting by and watching things being done.
Alice didn�t think about any of this when she got home from work and watched television for three hours before bed, mostly because she was too tired. And she thought almost nothing of it when the government issued her, along with the millions of other Americans, a new digital television, for safety purposes. The other televisions, it turned out, caused massive eye problems with other assorted health consequences attached, like migraine headaches. Something about the low resolution and myopia. Or astigmatisms. And headaches, headaches all the time. So the new televisions, government-subsidized, necessary for the good of public health, they came in the mail. And everyone took them out and plugged them in. For safety. For health.
