PART SIX
THE WORLD OF WORK
1. DOWN SOUTH
ROY WORKED HARD on a farm all day and slept every night in a big barn with many moo-cows, horsies, and baa-baas. The moo-cows were Roy’s favorite, especially the one named Elsie with the biggest udders. Whenever Roy found himself growing nostalgic about Wanda and the great sex they used to have together, he would begin looking at Elsie with a fondness that Elsie was too slow and cudulent to appreciate. The harder Roy stared, the better Elsie looked, until eventually Roy couldn’t contain himself any longer. At this point he would climb over the wooden gate, grab roughly ahold of Elsie’s wide, fly-bitten haunches, and give her a little of the old what for. It was quick and it was good. It even helped Roy forget about Wanda for a while.
Roy liked the South because it was hot, muggy, and littered with overripe fruits and vegetables. It was amazing the things you could find just walking down the road or through the fields on any given afternoon. Blackening figs, busted melons, sun-dried tomatoes, and rotting apricots were distributed freely across the hot dust like stray manna. All you had to do was tear off the smelly bits and toss them in your mouth. Insects, dust, road grease, and all.
Roy worked in the fields and ran errands for the plantation’s top corporate management executives, Darrel and Chloe Johansen of the Georgia Plantation Counsel. The Counsel was a wholly owned subsidiary of the International Produce Board, which was itself an autonomous, self-sustaining division of, what else, Worldco Enterprises, Inc. Here the remote, unfriendly administrative staff spent their days hidden away in tartly air-conditioned offices, monitoring or being monitored by faceless account specialists and stock analysts from all over the Internet. They didn’t mix with the farm staff. They didn’t let their voices be heard over the loudspeakers. In fact, they didn’t make any public appearances at all, unless it was to pose for photographers from the company’s weekly newsmagazine, At One with Worldco.
Every evening after working up a healthy sweat lobbing spuds into a wooden barrel, Roy returned to his cot in the bunkhouse, popped a Bud, and leafed through the various disposable men’s magazines and sports newsletters deployed as tablecloths in the Animal Mess. The pink, airbrushed human females were too clean and pink for Roy’s tastes, but he loved browsing through the glossy advertisements for men’s cologne, stereo equipment, and sports cars. Roy couldn’t read, exactly, but he didn’t need to.
“Buy a new car!” Roy improvised, running his fingers across the bold black letters and sounding out each imagined vowel, as if he were performing a sort of braille karaoke. “This car is really good! Drive this car and this blond girl will really love you! Buy this car and you will really love yourself!”
When his spud-roughened fingers reached the page’s glossy bottom, Roy breathed a sigh of tremendous satisfaction. Reading, he decided, was easy. You didn’t have to decipher what the figures meant. You only had to dream about who they wanted you to be.
***
SOME NIGHTS, SATED with glossy reading, Roy would wander around the barn talking out loud to himself and pretending Wanda had come back. He imagined preparing exotic meals of banana soup, banana stew, and banana cream pie, serving them to her on a candlelit picnic table in back of the barn while soft music played on his transistor radio. When Wanda came home, he would teach her how to love again. He would teach her about what slick magazines called “the new romance,” and about what he called “the new Roy.”
“You are looking very beautiful tonight, my dear,” Roy would say out loud, pouring multiple glasses of chilled Gallo Tawny Port or lime-dashed Safeway Gin. “Have I told you about this little magazine article I was reading yesterday? It seems that this very beautiful young woman fell in love with a very beautiful young man because of his new underwear. How charming, you say? Oh yes, very charming, indeed.”
The nights would pass in a long, slow rouse of passionate undress. Roy would satisfy Wanda in every conceivable orifice, and somewhere along the line she would satisfy him in every orifice, too. Fireworks, violins, crystal chandeliers, ballroom dancing, caviar, and pearls. Around them in the glowing, shaggy barn the assembled horsies and baa-baas would look on with blank, chewing amazement. They would wonder about this thing called Love. They would ask themselves, Why doesn’t it ever happen to me?
Some nights Roy grew so drunk with washtub gin that he passed out in Elsie’s stall, her inflated pink bloomers tangled around his ankles like an amorous receipt. When he awoke the following morning, the barn was shot through with shafts of moted sunlight. Outside, farm machinery revved and pigs bickered huskily over slop.
“Big night, Roy?” asked Tom Parkinson, the company overseer. Tom opened the gate to Elsie’s stall and showed Roy a dented aluminum pail. “You hairy primitive types can’t get enough of it, can you, boy?”
Roy sat up in the damp straw and reached for his sweaty forehead.
“I don’t feel so good, Tom. I want to sleep some more. Could I please sleep some more, Tom? Or is it already time to get up?”
Tom Parkinson was a large, overexercised middle-management executive who had been kicked out of Worldco’s New York office for either being too obsequious or not obsequious enough (even New Yorkers couldn’t tell the difference these days).
He tossed Roy the dented aluminum pail with a hollow, blunt clattering.
“I don’t think so, Roy,” Tom Parkinson said, without a trace of sympathy. “You nailed Elsie, man. You milk her. And I’ll expect this whole damn barn swept and dusted by oh-eight hundred hours. Or you can just forget about breakfast.”
***
ROY LOVED THE outdoor life, and looked back on the day he was parceled off to the free enterprise system as just about the best thing that had ever happened to him. Like Muzak in an elevator, life on the corporate farm constantly replayed an unending medley of Roy’s favorite hits: porridge, sweat, sun-damaged fruit, televised sports in the Animal Canteen, and screwing Elsie the Cow like there was no tomorrow. Days turned into months, months into years, and Roy never once found himself being awkwardly surprised by things he’d never done, or experiences he’d never known.
Then, one day in late autumn, a strange new face appeared at the farm, and began to make Roy deeply uneasy about the only life he had ever lived.
“You guys are really pathetic, do you know that?” Dave the Otter had recently been appointed the statewide representative of Mr. Big’s National Organization for Animals, which at last report was being run out of a P.O. box in the South Bronx. “You’re sleeping in your own shit, for Christ’s sake. You’re drinking slime out of troughs. You’re shuffling along saying ‘Yes, Massah’ and ‘No, Massah’ and ‘Thanks for all the gruel, Massah,’ while what’re the corporate big shots doing? They’re laughing at you guys, man. They’re sitting up there in that big Bauhaus-like corporate monstrosity, sipping wine coolers behind their reflective windows and having a good old-fashioned hoot at all you stupid putzes down here. Working your butts off for beans, man. Being grateful for slop.”
Dave the Otter showed up in Roy’s barn every evening after the final chow down. Standing behind a podium jury-rigged together from splintering orange crates and moldy lumber, he addressed the sparse crowd through a bottomless Big Gulp container that he wielded like a megaphone. Usually he began each Get Down Seminar by distributing a few tattered leaflets and questionnaires, or by playing an inspirational political announcement from Mr. Big.
Ayaaanimooohls muuuuhsss yeeew-nite!” declared Mr. Big through the undependable medium of a Walgreen’s-brand cassette player. “Pleeeeyuhz doooo-nate generuuuuuhshly tooo the caww-uhsh.”
Then, after clicking off Mr. Big’s Dopplering voice (which sounded as if it were being played on a bad high school film projector) Dave the Otter passed the hat while giving the animals their evening lesson in Intro to Animal Ec.
“What the boss’s trying to say, see, is that you guys are like the manufacturers of wealth, and you don’t even know it, man!” The most exciting thing about Dave the Otter was his ability to grow excited by his own rhetoric. It was an amazing, almost profound thing to watch, the barnyard denizens conceded. A fellow animal driven by the hard interior momentum of his own voice, and not by some spotty human being in a tractor. “You guys work the physical stuff that is the world, and there ain’t nothing more important in the techno-capitalist system of wealth production. You guys till the soil. You guys lay the eggs. You guys express the milk and yogurt and cheese. You procreate, reduplicate, and rear your animal babies for human table fodder. You reach into the bowels of the earth and make food to eat, houses to live in, and clothes to wear. You guys enjoy what the boss calls ‘an original and healthy relationship with worldly existence,’ and that’s a good thing, that’s a positive thing. But what do those corporate big shots do all day, huh? While you guys are doing all the ball-breaking, heart-rending work of the world, what are those people doing in their air-conditioned cubicles, huh?”
Whenever Dave the Otter ventured a question, the crowd grew uneasy with itself. Cynical pigs smirked and swaggered in loose little circles. Moo-cows looked hammer-struck, dazed by their own inspeculation. Baa-baahs even stopped bleating and chewing, which were just about the only things they knew how to do. In fact, out of all the collective animal riffraff, only Roy, besotted by this point with cheap beer, made any effort at all to answer Dave’s questions. Not because Roy thought the questions were important, but because he couldn’t repress his lifelong desire to satisfy any animal who possessed more authority than he did.
“Are the human executive types working really hard, Dave?” Roy asked with a tiny belch. “I mean, erp, are they getting the food and clothes we make into grocery and department stores? And then do they look after us, and make sure we have enough food to eat and clothes to wear?”
Roy always liked the feel of the answer in his mouth, but he never liked the sound it made when it landed in the barn around him. It seemed to echo off the walls with an unraveling hiss.
“Distributing the wealth,” Dave responded thinly. “Caring for you animals. Working really hard.” Dave the Otter looked at Roy as if he were a big black hole in the middle of the barn. Somebody would have to fill that hole someday. Otherwise it would sit there forever, resounding with its own absence.
“You’re a real wizard, Roy, you really are.” Dave shook his head slightly. “A really admirable hunk of animal intellect.”
Roy breathed a sigh of relief. He liked when Dave understood how hard he tried–even if the majority of his answers were completely incorrect.
“Why, thank you, Dave,” Roy said, saluting him with the potatoish dregs of his beer. “You’re a pretty wizardly guy yourself.”
2. MANHATTAN MELODY
BACK IN MANHATTAN, Roy’s ex-wife, Wanda, was wishing Animal Action would pack up all its rhetoric and go home. Everywhere she turned she saw urgent, half-familiar slogans scrawled on street-front walls and bus stop kiosks. Police sirens wailed in the congested streets, pursued by big white ambulances and pivoting Newswatch helicopters. Lone animals, adrift with shopping carts full of consumer refuse, were randomly hustled into police vans and crowd-control vehicles, while on the perimeters of every altercation louder, hastier animals shouted through staticky megaphones
“DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU!
DON’T LET THIS
HAPPEN TO YOU!”
before they were either surrounded by phalanxes of burly policemen, or else fled into the rapidly encroaching “bad neighborhoods.”
There seemed to be a tremendous discord at work in the knotty medley of Manhattan, and Wanda didn’t like it one bit. She didn’t like the way she was leered at by passing taxi drivers, or the way she was refused seats in good restaurants and uptown movie theaters. But most of all she didn’t like the way her custom was treated by the local merchants, as if they were doing her a big favor by taking her money.
“Nice day, isn’t it, Habib?” Often, when Wanda tried to engage the corner grocer in friendly conversation, he didn’t seem to like it. He hurled her fresh vegetables into a brown paper bag, and pushed her change back across the counter as if it was radioactive.
“No nice day,” Habib told her, gesticulating rudely at the noisy streets outside. “Animals shitting everywhere, making noises about great country. Saying ‘Humans bad,’ ‘Humans, go home,’ ‘Humans must die,’ and other bad things. Habib come to this country and buy store, raise family, try to make great American country his home. I ask you, why can’t animals do the same? Why can’t animals realize how very lucky they are?”
***
EVER SINCE WANDA’S therapist, Dr. Reikoff, was taken into custody by the FBI, Wanda felt her entire life unraveling like cheap socks. Mrs. Garfield stopped appreciating her work in the kitchen, and Mr. Garfield stopped appreciating her work in the back hall. Joe the doorman stopped asking her out for late drinks at the Raccoon Lodge, and Barney the local cop on the beat stopped teasing her with a tip of his hat and a “Cheerio, Simba!” Worst of all, Wanda didn’t have any of her old friends left to play with anymore. Whenever she called, she never got further than their scratchy answering machines.
“Oh hi, Bobo?”
Wanda leaned into the hall telephone, trying to evade the weird slurping sounds of the Garfields, who were currently in the dining room delving into Wanda’s latest rendition of Moo-Shu Spicy Pork.
“I was just calling, that’s all. Did you get any of my messages? Are you okay? When are we having Girls’ Night Out again? Did you ever find a job? I can’t seem to reach you anymore, Bobo. Not you and not Betty. Don’t all these Animal Activists scare you a little? They sure scare me. Oh well.”
Back in the dining room Stan Garfield erupted out of his own silence–which was the only way he knew to communicate anything these days.
“Wanda! Has this got chili in it! You know I can’t eat chili on accounta my polyps!”
“Gotta go,” Wanda whispered into the receiver, but it wasn’t so easy hanging up. This thinly coiled plastic cord connected her to the only reality that still mattered. The one she couldn’t get to. The one that wouldn’t respond. “But call me back, will you? Promise? Please?”
But Wanda’s friends never called back. And it began to look like they never would.
***
THEN ONE DAY on her way home from picking up the children from school, Wanda passed a public demonstration. It was the first day of spring, and Wanda had been looking forward to this day all winter long.
“Humans are bad! Animals are good! Humans are bad! Animals are good!” This wasn’t your usual ragtag shouting match, with a lot of cardboard bluster, but rather a mean, surly bunch of mismatched creatures that extended all the way across Park Avenue, blocking traffic for miles in every direction.
“What’s everybody yelling about?” asked the Garfields’ little girl. “Has there been an accident, Wanda? Where did all the police come from? Why are all those animals so angry?”
Wanda quickly hustled the children through a crowd of human onlookers. Many of the humans were dressed in business suits and carried briefcases. Others wore Levi’s, brown headbands, tennis shoes, and packages of Marlboros rolled into the sleeves of their starched white T-shirts. There was something generic about their blue eyes and closely cropped blond hair, like packages in a budget supermarket.
“Just move along, children,” Wanda told them. “Stop dawdling and move along.” She was trying to interpose her body between them and the altercation of words in the street.
“Mr. Big will come! Mr. Big will come! Mr. Big will come!”
Then, as abrupt as a corner collision of yellow cabs, one of the generic blond types hurled a stone and the chanting divided up the middle into an arrhythmic beat.
“Mr. Big. Will come, Mr.–Come, Mr. Big. Will come Mr. Big–”
Then, from the crowd, another blond type turned beet red and shouted: “So go back to the woods, you creeps! You don’t belong here! You don’t belong!”
By the time Wanda had herded her miniature set of Garfields into their penthouse apartment, they were bubbling over with questions she didn’t know how to answer.
“Why do people hate animals so much, Wanda?”
“Why do animals hate people?”
“Do you hate us, Wanda? Are we supposed to hate you?”
“Where’d those blond men get those neat armbands? Can you make me an armband? Can I wear one to school?”
And while Wanda boiled rice in a pot and arranged filleted chicken breasts on a baking sheet, she snapped and batted at the children’s questions as if they were a swarm of stinging insects.
“No you can’t wear an armband to school. I don’t know why, you just can’t. Animals don’t hate people and I don’t hate you. No, of course they’d never hurt you. They’d never hurt you because I wouldn’t let them. No, you couldn’t hurt them, either, and no, that doesn’t mean I like them as much as I like you. Because it would be wrong, that’s why. Because it wouldn’t be right!”
With this Wanda would slam shut the oven door and activate the baking timer. Mr. and Mrs. Garfield were eating out tonight at a five-thousand-dollar-a-plate political rally for their favorite New York Senator, a former Republican who had recently joined the Democratic Party in order to help enact Republican legislation. (Wanda thought it was good for Mr. Garfield to get politically involved. After all, a man had to believe in something.)
The children blinked at one another in slow unison.
“But, Wanda, how do you know when something’s wrong and when it’s right? Don’t all those people outside think they’re right? And don’t all those animals think they’re right, too?”
This was the part Wanda hated. When their questions made more sense than her answers.
The only possible response she could come up with at such times was this: “Would you both please go into the living room and watch some TV. I’ve got work to do, remember?”
Then she disentangled their fingers from her hairy arms and sent them on their way
3. TOP DRAWER
ABOUT THIS SAME time in Washington, D.C., the President of the United States was doing everything he could to catch up on world events.
“Yes, General. Yes, General. Yes, I know it’s a jungle out there, General. No, just because it’s covered with ice doesn’t mean it’s not a jungle. Of course not. Of course penguins are wild creatures, just like lions and tigers. Of course they can’t be trusted. I’m not saying that, General. What I’m trying to say is–yes, General. Yes, of course, General. But that’s what I’m trying to tell you, General. I can’t send reinforcements, however much I’d–yes, General. Of course, General. Of course.”
Sometimes the President had days like this. Here he was, the nation’s Chief Executive Officer, and everybody treated him like some random voice on a 1-900 Complaint Line. Whatever happened to that good old American expression “When I say jump, you ask how high?” The only expression the President ever heard around the Oval Office anymore was “The buck stops here.” Everything else was in Korean, Serbo-Croatian, or Japanese.”
“Yes, General. I’m sure, General. Women are very fickle creatures, General, especially if you say so. Well, maybe she’ll come back, General, maybe she’s just taken a little– No, of course I wouldn’t go to New York City for my holiday, either; I’d go bass fishing out on Lake– I’m sorry, General. Yes, you do matter to me. Bass fishing, yes, on Lake Winnemucca, but then I’m partial to– Yes, General. Yes. Of course I do. Yes. Yes, I do care about you personally, and not as a what? A randomly exploitable integer on the profit abacus of the multinational defense and weapons industry? No, absolutely not, General. You matter to me as an individual human being.”
The President twisted the receiver away from his mouth long enough to expel a long, pointless sigh. Meanwhile, the General’s voice continued buzzing tinnily in the room like something out of Spin Control. Even when nobody was listening it still made a sound.
Then the front door opened and the President looked up.
“No, General, I don’t want to put either you or your troops at the mercy of those, well, those penguins. And I’ll personally okay your hiring of another native translator and personnel coordinator–and yes, General, yes, of course she can be female, of course she can. But I. Well I. No I. But, General. Yes, General. Okay yes.”
Secretary of State Bill Murdley brought in the hot cocoa on an embossed silver tray and set it on the sea of varnished mahogany. He took the plush leather chair just to the President’s left, and sank gently into their morning itinerary.
House Speaker, he read. Minority Whip. Finance Committee Chairman. The International Banking Spokesperson, the Fed Executive Committee, and last but not least, the business editor of The New York Times.
“But you hold the line out there, General. I said hold the line. No, General. No, I’m not putting you on hold–General? Hello? No, but I do have to go. And keep warm, will you? No, General, no, no, I’ve really got to go. Gotta go, General. No, I’ll call you, General. Just try to have a nice time while you’re down there–though of course I realize that’ll be difficult. But really, General. Really. I’m not kidding this time. I’ve really gotta go.”
As the President gently put down the receiver, he felt the entire Oval Office subside a little, like pistons in a deactivated combustion engine.
“Busy day, Mr. President?”
They both looked at the wall clock. It wasn’t even 9:30 A.M.
“Busy day,” the President conceded.
The President switched off the Call-In Request indicator, leaned back in his swivel chair, and propped his feet on the desk. He took the mug of hot cocoa to warm his palms, trying to make this moment last. This was far and away his favorite part about being President.
The President loved being briefed.
“We got problems, Mr. President.” The Secretary of State noisily opened a manila folder in his lap. “Animal problems, Mr. President. Big ones.”
The President sipped his hot cocoa and closed his eyes.
“Don’t hesitate, man. Give it to me straight.”
“What’s that, Mr. President?”
The President smiled.
“Who is this Mr. Big,” he asked. “And what the hell are we going to do about him.”
On the President’s lips they didn’t sound like questions.
They sounded like answers about to happen.
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