Super Flat Times (5 page)

I put the bag in the brushed aluminum bin of the scale. My finger hummed inside the bloody mitten. My husband — the man who withered away his days in our house, among our toys, our things, shamelessly, openly — had gray eyes, the grayest eyes I’d ever seen. They were like pencil sketches, crude approximations — they were vague and watery enough to take in the whole room at once, which was confusing and frustrating when the one thing I wanted was for him to concentrate on what was going on closest to his face. In some ways, it was easy to understand, already, what he would be like after he was dead.

The apples tumbled around in the sack, shaking the rickety scale, and as it shimmied there next to the cash register I noticed that Philip was gone. The farmer pointed toward the central tower, beneath which several guards had gathered. They cupped their hands to their faces, shouting up to the top, where Philip clung.

“Just let go easily,” they called up. “You’ll slide down. You won’t be hurt.”

Philip did not move. He pressed his face into the cool, marbled beef. He was trying to make himself faint. This was what he did instead of crying. He was high up, into the slender neck of the tower, where the meat was frozen, its surface caked over with shining, granular frost.

“What’s he doing?” one of the guards asked.

“Might be hungry,” the other guard answered. And then he shouted, “Hello? We can give you food down here, buddy. Lots of, like, chocolate for you? Candy canes, fudge bars, the whole shot.”

“Your hands are going to freeze right off, champ,” the other one joined in. “Or you’ll get your hands permanently stuck. We’ll have to — I’ll tell you, we’re going to have to cut big cubes of meat where your hands are, and that meat will be permanently attached to you, so then you’ll have to go to school with these, like, big hunks of meat all over your hands.”

“No one’s going to want that,” said the other one.

“No sir. You’ll be known as the boy with meat for hands. At school — everywhere. They’ll look at you and point and say, ‘Hey, isn’t that the boy with meat for hands?’ And they’ll know you’re the one because of the big mittens you’ll have to wear to cover up the rotting chunks of meat.”

“Big mittens, son. Burlap mittens.”

Philip responded by burrowing his head farther into the meat. He was up to his ears. Even from where I stood, I could see his little knuckles going white with concentration.

I started toward the tower. I remember thinking clearly that this was a time when something motherly should come to me. I should have been able to conjure up a string of delicate, loving phrases that would turn Philip into an obedient boy, a soft pastry of a child who would loosen his grip just enough to drop contritely to the foot of the tower and bury his small head, fiery with apology, in my lap. But all that came out of me was air, water, heat — the elements of speech without the speech itself, as if my head had not come with a proper instruction manual, or I had not read the one with which it was issued. Suddenly it was as if I no longer had a head at all, as if my body had always held in suspicion the organ that had commanded it with Manichaean accuracy for all these years, and the ugly, perforated case in which it was housed, and a wholesale rejection was, just then, coming to light.

As Philip lost consciousness and began to slide down the slick face of the meat tower, slowly, comically, like a drunk collapsing on a greasy lamppost, the men below advancing with lumbering steps, wielding orange safety blankets and oxygen machines, I thought about my husband, lying there on the bed, how long he had been there, how we would find him, later that day, after having put away the groceries, lying on the bed, in the same position that we’d left him, only smaller, like a doll, his face gruesomely split in half, a tiny, blue handgun nestled in the twisted sheets, still warm, the contents of his head spread out across the pillows like an anatomical diagram — how, even with this degree of detail, the events of his life would remain so distant and abstract to us as never to have really happened at all.

The Boyish Mulatto

W
hat I wanted, during those years, was to drive a robot. They weren’t letting me do that.

“This job does not involve a robot,” I told the trembling, wispy human resources clerk at the Ministry of Work and Culture, sliding the brittle manila envelope back across the seafoam Formica surface of the help desk.

“It’s as close as we could come, given your circumstances.”
“Tooth model?”

“You have very straight teeth.”

“Where’s the robot in all of this?”

The clerk sat back in his chair reflectively. Behind him was a framed photograph of a group of shirtless men climbing a sheer cliff at sundown, with the inscription
T.E.A.M. TOGETHER EVERYONE ACHIEVES MORE.
“Geoffrey,” he said, “we wouldn’t want to mislead you about how endearing we find your crusade. We’re actually trying to help you, though it may not seem that way. You’re well aware that robots are for boys. Take the tooth model position. Like it.”

“I ought to stab you all in the neck,” I said. But I took the job anyway, and countless others like it. Finally, I ended up at the Center for Post-Corporate Education, where I taught people how to eat with their whole body.

The problem is that I am a boyish mulatto — I pass for a child, but not for long enough to get a decent job. There is a marker in the grand lobby of the Division of Gradated Employment Services, a red plastic arrow, and like at a child’s amusement park ride, nobody even gets to interview for the good jobs unless she can pass safely underneath. I’ve often fooled them with my height, but something in the way I carry myself has always given away my age, even when I’ve tried to disguise my behavior with binding nylon tunics and head vests. To put it in the only way it matters, I’m old.

At the center my colleagues and I taught people different techniques of coaching food, getting the best performance out of a meal. This type of eating was called “Eating,” and it involved an intricate set of stances that are illegal now. Our goal, stressed in the grueling two-hour instruction tape, was to teach people how to work in the table, the whole room. It was a lifestyle. “When you think about eating,” the trainer on the tape said, strolling past a series of staggered food murals, “think about the part of yourself that has to leave to make room for the food coming in. Where does it go? That is the central question. That is when we turn eating into Eating.”

The training program was for people who’d reached their Terminal Age Potential, and had been subsequently let go. They were given a voucher by their former employers for a two-month stay at the center. It was a way of burying the rejection, of walking it off, something that people often did after the first part of their life was over.

Our Greeters led the candidates out onto the floor of the loud gymnasium and paired them up with one of us. I was dealt a slight, sooty girl whose nameplate said “Marian: 19 yrs.” She was not pretty, but I felt a deep, immediate attraction. Her face was wide and flat, flanged at the ends like a clothes hanger, something familiar you could file yourself away on. She smiled politely as I led her over to our foam practice mat and I saw that a piece of her left front tooth was missing — it was the sort of imperfection that holds all of one’s other features hostage. The sudden, panicked manner with which she shut down the expression, before it had fully bloomed, revealed that the defect had marked her for good.

I stood behind her, arms crossed over her abdomen, pressing my palms upward just below her ribs, demonstrating rapid breath technique. I only came up to her shoulders, which made positions such as Filtering the Pool and Attending the Korean Audio Science Museum more challenging than they should have been. Gradually, though, her body yielded to my embrace.

“You’ve got strong legs,” she whispered, unable, in my grasp, to fully enunciate.

“Shhh. No talking,” I hissed, irritated and confused that she should comment on the condition of my legs when it was my arms, after all, that were doing all the work.

“I like legs,” she said.

I did nothing to engage her further.

“This is such bullshit,” she added as we followed the instructions being piped in from the control booth in the ceiling.

“Think of yourselves as big airports,” the voice said, “with food planes constantly landing — you’ve got to get those planes back in the air. How can we get those planes back in the air?”

No one was allowed to communicate at all during the training sessions, but she started asking me things with different outfits she would show up in — one day a bright pink nylon vest, another day brown sweatpants and a yellow scarf. The Greeters frowned upon this. They strongly recommended the hunter green mesh jumpers that everyone else wore, every day, without complaint. Each morning they put her farther and farther back in the snack line as punishment. I was ashamed to be stuck with a miscreant, but also secretly relieved and fascinated. I started answering her queries in the best way that I could, which was to wear a poncho made entirely from the bristled, penetrative half of Velcro.

Three months later, after the graduation ceremonies, I followed her out of the gymnasium. “Say —,” I called out, choking on the words. It had been some time since I’d used my face to talk. The muscles in my throat had gone perilously tender from disuse.

She turned, holding her right hand to her throat to indicate her own discomfort.

“I just.”

“Yes you. May —”

We strolled, arm in arm, from the center to the tube, trying to avoid conversation, nearly having forgotten what language was for in the first place.

In the tube I wet my pants while she looked at the schedule, but only drop by drop, letting each bit air-dry before moving on to the next.

She’d missed her train, so I took her to my apartment, where we washed down pale green meal tablets with foil sacks of dinner wine. I felt small and far away from her on the couch.

“What — are you?” she said, pointing to my body. It was difficult, in those first days, to understand everything she said — what came out of her was more like a set of breathy, musical notes, whole mouthfuls of them. Pretty, though. I am sure she had the same trouble with my own spittled, mawkish bursts of language. We relied heavily on clothes, sketches, the arrangement of objects in the room to convey meaning.

“No. I’m — I am an older. This person you see — this? I am older than this. Looks? Like.”

“Oh. And you — when were you. Terminated?”

“No. Where I work — they know. They — that I am. An old.”

She turned to me fully, her voice wavering with tentative, half-turned words. “Geoffrey, what am I supposed — I can’t go back to work — I already, went. And they would not? Let me back in.”

On someone’s last day at one of the corporations, usually his or her nineteenth birthday, the executives throw something called an unwelcoming party, in which the graduating candidate is forced to perform an exit suite on a horned instrument called an octavinet, a relative of the shofar. The performance ends with the removal of the candidate’s clothing by his or her coworkers and a subsequent session of intense, bodily humiliation. Live burial in a grain casket was often employed whenever shredded dung was in short supply, before both were outlawed. I imagined Marian’s last day — her sudden, awkward shame dramatically exaggerated in the harsh fluorescence of some office lounge while peers looked on, smirking. How she must’ve looked the next day, showing up, unbidden, loitering at the massive glass doors of the Department of Human Interface Engineering. I had deftly averted my own unwelcoming from Corporation Two, some twenty years before, by forgetting not to lean too heavily on the flimsy, rusted-out railing of a tiny smoking balcony. It hurt worse than I’d imagined, and one of my kneecaps went permanently numb, but by the time the casts came off, everyone had forgotten I ever worked there.

Marian started to make a face, gnashing her lips like a child cradling some disagreeable food in its mouth.

“Don’t — oh, don’t. You don’t have,” I said, drawing her close. I held her head to my chest, away from the mirror on the opposite wall to shield her from her own pale, burst visage.

“What do I — do.”

“Let’s go — we can go away from here. You can forget. It.” “What do you mean. Go,” she said, straightening up a little. “I’m not — that is — we could easily. That is, leave. On a flying object — one of those —”

“Airplane.”

“Yes.”

“Oh. I would very. Much like that,” she said, grinding a mashed tissue into one eye socket.

“Right then.”

“Will it actually. Leave — the ground because? I can’t leave the ground because? Of a fake lung. A plastic lung. That will inflate in the — air.”

I booked us on an ocean cruise instead. We would pass through Oceans Three and Four over the course of two weeks in a luxury vessel, the Travel Administrator informed me, one of the large, air-buoyed ones with wide glass fins.

“Which package would you prefer?” she asked.

“Whatever costs the most of — that object drawn from an employer, a paper item. Colorful — that is — how does one call this?”

“Money. The one that costs the most money?” answered the small, distant voice through the speech bead.

“Yes. Please remove as much money as possible. From myself.”

“This is truly — it’s something I’ll never forget,” she said when we saw the vessel for real. Holding a wide-brimmed hat close to her head against the gusting bay breeze, she ushered me on with great enthusiasm.

“You’re walking me too fast,” I said, stumbling to keep pace. “That’s the point, dear.” Her sentences were getting more elaborate and vivid. My own speech had always left something to be desired, so often had I abused it with silence. Even more so with Marian, though — I dreaded saying something that might offend her, terrified that she might simply disappear in retaliation.

Neither of us had ever been on a cruise — I hadn’t ever had a proper vacation before, save for the series of private debasements that passed as family trips. The idea of a cruise was appealing. It was the only way you could get far away from people and stay there, suspended in the amniotic grace of the ocean.