Nonentity (6 page)

Jillian Flemming spent six weeks institutionalized. Following her discharge, Hagen moved in with her and became a loving son who atoned for his transgressions. His devotion brought her a measure of peace. She died of pneumonia at fifty-three, a little more than three years after moving home from the psych hospital. In all that time, I paid her four visits.

She did not benefit from my company. It zapped her energy to interact with me. She did not even remember me as her son by the end. Or so I tried to reassure myself after she was gone – whenever the remorse approached maximum density.

My illusory encounter with Lawrence Alister at the bar forced me to reflect on my brother again. I had not seen Hagen since my mother’s funeral. I knew nothing of his subsequent whereabouts. Lawrence himself was supposed to be dead when I spoke with him. Yet, I believed everything that Lawrence (or his apparition) told me: that Hagen had joined the underground to avenge our father’s death, that he had known Lorna, and that he had been evaporated.

But it was not in this life for me to verify the truth about my brother. It was in the next.

“The math I teach,” said my friend Cranston Gage, “is not really math at all. It’s creativity with numbers.”

Cranston had taught professionally for over half of his forty-nine-plus years. Public schooling, he claimed, conditioned children to believe that there were no definitive answers. Two plus two might equal four, yet could just as easily equal five, six, twelve, or a thousand. Truth was malleable. Objective facts did not exist, only subjective views that amounted to “bias” whenever they clashed with establishment narratives. The Permanent Regime thereby dictated the terms of reality.

It had not always been so. When Cranston’s career began, the system rigorously challenged young people, trying to identify future leaders of the Regime. That approach lost favor. The Regime instituted special academies for “gifted” children, the offspring of those high up in government, banking, armaments, and other well-connected industries. The remaining schools sought to mass produce “good citizens” who would reflexively accept and do whatever instructed.

Cranston grew contemptuous of his working conditions. His rage spilled into his personal life. He chased away one wife, and then another. His three children also cut ties with him. The adversity intensified his antipathy toward the Regime. He embraced anarchism and joined causes with other radicals.

Using the code name Agent One Minus Three, he wrote treasonous articles for the underground. One of his pieces, “Esoteric Agendas,” read in part:

It starts in the home. A child grows up under the care of one or two parents who blindly serve tyranny. These parents obey all the laws of society. They pay their taxes with pride. They typically work for the government or a corporation that thrives on a government-rigged market. They vote in every election. They wave flags and stand in reverence whenever they hear a Regime-worshipping anthem. They question nothing. The child learns, mostly by osmosis, our culture’s noblest virtue: conformity.

Usually before the child can walk, his parents plop him in front of a flickering monitor that showcases one mind-numbing program after the next, along with advertisements that condition the child to equate his self-worth with his material possessions. Steady television helps render him a passive observer. The ubiquitous tube cannot do the job alone.

At four or five years-old, the child sits on a curb, causing no mischief that should concern any third parties. A gigantic yellow bus charges down the street to swoop him out of his natural environment and heave him into a place he would least like to be. He thereby discovers the essence of life under the Regime: The State owns him.

At the onset of each school day, the child stands with his peers to recite The Pledge of Subservience. He then marches from room to room like a zombie. He encounters information ranging from the useless to the pernicious. He learns the government can do no wrong, the police are his friends, all the Regime’s wars are justified, voting is his sacred duty, etc.

Elsewhere in the essay:

The most important messages of formal education are implicit. The child unconsciously internalizes and personalizes them.

He attends classes where teachers present material. The teachers need not demonstrate any personal credentials. They need not authenticate the material they present. They expect the child to automatically believe everything they profess. The lesson: authority figures are exempt from evidential and logical standards; a “good citizen” takes the words of authority at face value and without question.

This system trains the child to tolerate daily confinement in a place he would prefer to avoid. Such training resigns him to his future as an obedient worker, wherein he will endure hours of tedium and follow the orders of his corporate superiors without complaint. Most significantly, his eventual position in the workplace will thrust him into the producing class – rather, the exploited class. He will then serve his key function as a human: paying taxes.

The State reaps other benefits from compulsory education. The numerous arbitrary rules of school prepare the child for the legal leviathan of the adult world. The grading system compels him to pursue a letter on a page, a precursor to his workplace paycheck, which trivializes learning. Formal schooling consists of authority figures who chastise the child, stifle him, and ultimately define him – applying standards alien to him. The confiscation of his time precludes him from entering the marketplace and competing for jobs. The current workforce is consequently a reliable advocate of this system.

From this environment the child emerges an ideal citizen-serf. He accepts without question whatever his rulers tell him. Defiance never crosses his mind. He has unconditional love for the Regime. Such is the outcome in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases. The lone dissident out of that sample is nothing that evaporation cannot rectify.

My disdain for government education nearly matched his. So I bristled when the Ministry of Miscommunication and Misdirection mandated that my department’s employees deliver a Regime-touting speech to a classroom of children. I had latitude in choosing which class to address. I made the appropriate arrangements with Cranston.

A week prior to the event, I received a packet of papers containing my speech. A double-underlined sentence blazed across the front page in cautionary red: YOU MUST COMMUNICATE THE ENTIRETY OF THIS CONTENT TO THE AUDIENCE WITH NO SUBTRACTIONS OR ADDITIONS. The document overflowed with patriotic mumbo jumbo, historical distortions, praise of voting, etc. One segment read: “Each one of us has a sacred duty to protect and preserve the Permanent Regime. Our great nation enjoys its freedom only because so many brave men and women sacrificed on the battlefield. Each of you has an opportunity for that honor. Your country needs you.” I cringed at the jingoistic sales pitch. I wished I had the balls to tell my higher-ups at Triple-M to go fuck themselves. But I could not afford to lose my job. Nor did I want the government to suspect me a potential trouble source.

On an autumn Tuesday I went to Cranston’s classroom. Thirty little desks faced a blackboard. Pictures of past and present Regime “heroes” littered the walls.

I handed Cranston my speech. He scanned it for a couple minutes. Tearing the pages in half, he said, “I won’t allow this horseshit in my classroom.”

I gasped. “Cranston, I have my orders. I must say what I’ve been given. I can’t …”

“Sorry. We can call this thing off for all I care. No one gets to subject my kids to that kind of demented boilerplate. You can stay and do it my way – or leave.”

“Well, I’m already here. I sure as hell don’t want to go to some other class. I’d rather get this over with.”

“Then do whatever you’ve got to do. Make your speech.”

“What would I say?” I asked.

“Whatever you want. Just don’t tell them to pay their taxes and vote. No propaganda. Aside from that, just improvise something.”

“What about the cameras in here? They’ll expose me as insubordinate.”

“Don’t worry about the cameras,” he said. “I disabled them.”

“How could you do that?”

“Easy. I grabbed a stool, took it over to each camera, and …”

“Forget about how you physically performed the act. What I meant was: don’t you worry about obstructing their monitoring system?”

Cranston grinned. “I’ve been part of this hoax for so long that they don’t watch me too closely these days. They focus on newer teachers who haven’t proven their loyalties. Besides, how can they blame me for their faulty equipment?”

“Will playing dumb like that actually work?”

“All of us play dumb. It’s the only way.”

Shortly thereafter, thirty pairs of eyeballs stared at me. They belonged to ten and eleven year-olds. The boys wore dull white shirts and black pants; the girls, checkered skirts.

“Hello,” I said, feeling the heat. “I’m Sebastian R. Flemming the Third. I work for the Ministry of Miscommunication and Misdirection. Have any of you heard of the Ministry?”

A girl with blond pig-tails in the front row raised her hand.

I stepped closer to her desk. “Yes. What is your name?”

“My name?” she said, making a strange face. “We don’t use our names. That might encourage favoritism. My student number is 23876644.”

“Quite a number. You’ve heard of the Ministry of Miscommunication and Misdirection, is that correct?”

“Yes. My daddy works for them.”

“What a coincidence. What does your daddy do for the Ministry?” I said.

“My mommy says that he tells lies.”

“Lies? Uh, well, uh – that can’t be right. Are you sure about that? Perhaps you misheard your mother.”

“Oh no. I heard her fine. She said that just because daddy tells lies at work doesn’t mean he tells them at home.”

Jolted, I eyed Cranston standing in the back. He flashed me a sardonic smile.

I said, “Well, I don’t know anything about that. I probably don’t even know your father. It’s a big department and I can’t vouch for everything that goes on there. I assure you that I do not tell lies. That kind of misconduct is not in my job description.”

The children appeared to believe that (somehow). I asked them nothing further, plowing through a humdrum monologue about some of my work assignments. To my relief, the students quickly lost interest.

In conclusion I said, “I trust that none of you has anything to ask about any of this. You’ve been a fine audience. Thank you for having me in your classroom.” Though hardly entertaining, the speech was not a disaster.

The period ended. The students filed out of the room. Cranston – and his sardonic smile – approached me.

“Nice recovery there,” he said. “When Amy made that remark about her daddy telling lies for the Ministry, I thought you might lose your breakfast.”

“Amy? You know her name?”

“I know all their names. Sometimes I use them right in the middle of class.”

“Damn. Isn’t that risky?”

He winked. “Breathing is risky.”

****

“My candidacy for Grand Premier will be a false memory by the time you read this,” wrote Gabriel Manchester in his underground memoir,
A Man of the Regime
. “I am gone. Evaporated. A nonentity.”

As Lawrence Alister predicted during my hallucination in the tavern, Gabriel Manchester mysteriously vanished from public life. A month before I obtained
A Man of the Regime
, Manchester stopped appearing in the film footage I reviewed for work. The other three Premier contestants remained. No one acknowledged Manchester’s departure.

I had scrutinized the man for six months. His speeches were consistently masterful. He was handsome and supremely confident, yet understated. His brilliance never smacked of elitism. I could not forget him.

A Man of the Regime
confirmed Alister’s drunken prophecy. Manchester wrote the book for posthumous publication in the underground. He foresaw his grim finale:

My existence has become superfluous. I will not be Grand Premier. The ruling forces will cleanse the name of “Gabriel Manchester” from public consciousness and relegate it to the confidential files of the Office of Misinformation. They will reduce me to a serial number.

I do not fear or regret my impending demise. It is neither possible nor desirable to thwart the inevitable. The Regime can murder my mind and my body; it will thereby only sow the seeds of its own destruction. One cannot evaporate ideals. Moral integrity does not succumb to aggression. Love will endure as humanity’s highest value. No regime – even one that arrogates to itself an imaginary permanence – can dismantle such a timeless, invincible value. Love wins in the end. The Regime disintegrates and all its victims attain vindication in the irreversible tide of history....

I set the book down on the table beside me. I poured myself a mug of coffee and lit a cigarette. Past two in the morning, I was camped out on the balcony outside my apartment. The cool air fused with the caffeine to keep me alert and focused. Faint sounds emanated from the street below. The world was otherwise dead, like Gabriel Manchester. His words lived:

I was the first child of R. Smith and Helen Manchester. A sister, a brother, and two more sisters followed me over the next fourteen years. My siblings and I grew up in a virtual palace and attended prestigious schools. I cannot look back on my upbringing with pride or gratitude. Brutality contaminated my family’s fortunes. Innocent bodies paved our road to prosperity.

R. Smith Manchester was the most devious, cutthroat, ingenious man I ever knew. He headed a division of the Injustice Department known informally as “The Iron Web.” A police state watchdog, he thrived on hunting so-called terrorists. His reputation grew with every arrest. Political ringmasters offered him candidacies for various offices. “Elected officials might as well be cardboard cutouts,” he said. He preferred the thrill of exterminating subversives.

My father became an anti-role model for me....

A mix of autobiography, historical expose`, and radical manifesto,
A Man of the Regime
shattered many of society’s sacrosanct myths. Manchester’s prose sparkled with the same beauty and conviction as his speeches. His underground code name was Albatross – which was what he represented to the reigning oligarchs. A wonder they had not terminated him sooner.