The Inner City (17 page)

“She’s wowing them,” Mort muttered.

As host of the Report on Reports, Ron introduced each participant by doing somersaults to and from the podium on the stage.

There was a mime who did a Report on Physical Inventory, then a clown who did the Financial Report, a juggler who did The Service Sector, and finally it was Paulina’s turn, the Report on Previous Reports.

She wore a long black gown with long black sleeves. She walked silently mid-stage and turned her back to the audience, which caused an uncertain snicker.

The stage had been prepped by the janitorial staff, which had set up pneumatic risers and small beams of light shooting up and out.

Janitors, secretaries, cleaning women, mail clerks and cafeteria workers stepped forward as the rear black curtain rose. They moved in straight lines and broke apart to form a large slow V on stage. Then the risers rose, and they were a chorus.

They sang:

My dreams have changed; why do they haunt me?

Who are these men who never seem to see me?

What happened to the joy I thought was due me?

How did I come here?

The pneumatic risers thrust different questions into the air. Each question or row of singers was answered by another row of singers with another question.

Where is the wonder, the hope?

Why is my heart drawn down at the start of each day?

And my spirit wasted?

They had wonderful voices, both magical and mundane. It was their one chance to ask the questions that bothered them; no one would listen to them again.

They ended:

When I was young, I never thought to come here;

How did I come here?

At the last word the risers in their various positions descended, and the spotlights went off scattershot, like ducks being hit at a midway.

“Lights up! Lights up!” Ron shouted, rushing out with his arms raised. He beamed broadly, as if he knew quite well what everyone was thinking. “Weren’t they terrific?” he cried insincerely. “But my, my, my, weren’t they a downer?” He winked broadly. “And wouldn’t you know it—it couldn’t come at a better time—the next one up is Manny Gomerson with his Judgement on the Reports. How we doin’, Manny?”

And to Paulina’s dismay (she hadn’t known their performances would be rated), Manny came out in a full-fledged tuxedo with a bunch of large interoffice envelopes in his hand. “Oh, that one wasn’t good for morale,” Manny stated, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “I mean, this is a job, right, not a psychiatrist’s couch. But enough philosophizing—let’s get down to work. We have seven prizes and eight Reports. How should we do this, Ron? Everyone made a great effort, and they all deserve prizes, but we don’t have enough to go around. We have to do some eliminating, okay? Can I have everyone up front?”

Mort patted Paulina on the shoulder—a loser’s pat, Paulina thought glumly.

As the last one off the stage she was the first to go back on, and lined up with Mindy, the mime, the juggler, two clowns, a baton twirler and a man who did a swing dance with a manikin. “They’re all going to win and I’m going to lose,” Paulina thought. She told herself that winning didn’t matter, that she had wanted to show off the truth and beauty of the chorus—but the chorus was huddled in the wings with disappointed faces.

“Only the first two rows vote,” Manny warned (those rows were reserved for bosses). “You just send in a number on your cell phones (everyone’s got a line to the Tally Committee now, right?). One to ten, ten the best. Here we go!”

The audience cheered and booed with absolute abandon. Ron encouraged it, striding across the stage like Groucho Marx and stopping to hold his hand over someone’s head for the vote. “Mimes are in a revival,” he shouted. “They’re kitschy, they’re quaint. But we still hate them, don’t we?” And the audience roared. They roared for Mindy (“Who knows what she said? Look at that dress!”) and the juggler (“Have you ever tried it? Start with eggs.”) It was obvious that the crowd was roaring at Ron, not the performers, because he got to Paulina and said, “We all appreciate the effort involved for everyone concerned, let’s give them a hand,” and the crowd clapped politely but unenthusiastically until Ron added, “For the anti-Hallelujah chorus.” Cheers and catcalls rang out.

A phone rang onstage and Ron picked it up. “We have our winners!” he shouted, holding up the envelopes, and he named everyone but Paulina. “Congratulations, all!” he crowed. “Your contract is renewed for another year.”

Paulina stood empty-handed. “Contract? I never had a contract.”

Ron rushed forward. “Which brings me to our latest announcement. As of today, all Report positions will be contracted out on a competitive basis. Sorry, Paulina, your bid lost.”

Paulina’s heart was sinking in full view. “Bid? Bid? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You didn’t think you had your job forever, did you?” Ron asked with theatrical sympathy, and turned to the crowd. “Who thinks they have their jobs forever?” The crowd booed. “See?” he said, turning back to her. “It’s just the times we live in. The times require sacrifice.”

The crowd cheered. Ron raised his hands and shook them together. “The party’s over!” he said. “Your jobs are all secure.” The audience applauded and laughed and began to leave their seats. He turned to Paulina as Mindy came over to join them.

“Well, that was utterly fantastic,” Mindy said, linking her arm with Ron’s (was Mindy now on Ron’s level?). “We’re both very impressed.” She raised her eyebrows to show how impressed she was.

There was something familiar about those eyebrows, Paulina thought. “Those are my eyebrows!” she cried. She rubbed her hand above her eyes: nothing!

“Did you hear her?” Mindy asked, laughing. “Did you hear how odd she is? I think she’d make a good comic, much better as a comic than as a whatever she is. What is she? I forget. Oh that’s right!” she smacked her head lightly. “You lost.”

“She worked in the blah-blah department,” Ron said. “Which is due for restructuring.”

“Well, she
does
have a creative approach.” Mindy said, cocking her head at Ron.

“A good sense of humour, too. Or is it drama?” His face got furrowed. “Was that comedy or tragedy and do we care?”

“No one cared,” Mindy said. “Why should they? But no hair, no eyebrows—will it upset the employees?” She took a quick glance over her shoulder to look sympathetically at Paulina.

“Everything upsets the employees,” Ron said resignedly.

“So they need cheering up. They need to laugh. I can see her as someone who would give us all a laugh.”

“That’s true. We could maybe do something with her.”

“Wait!” Paulina cried. It was painful, standing there as she was discussed. She had thought her chorus was terrific; she had dreamt of praise about it. How had she been so out of touch? There was a nakedness she felt now, her scalp bald under the wig, her face bald out in the world.

“But she won’t need a desk, will she?” Mindy said, ignoring her. “Comics don’t sit at desks, that would be silly.”

Ron frowned. “But wouldn’t silly actually be the idea?”

“No,” Mindy said. She shook her hair, Paulina’s hair. She raised her eyebrows, Paulina’s eyebrows. “Desks make things look important. That kills the laugh.”

“You always get straight to the crux,” Ron said.

“So here’s the story,” Mindy said, turning to Paulina. “You’ve been fired from your position—or, to avoid lawsuits, actually, your position’s been fired in response to the economic slowdown. You’re just collateral. But because we care—”

“We always care—”

“We’re going to make you a mopper. You mop things up. You keep your salary, you keep your hours, but you have to mop floors.”

“In a clown suit?” Ron asked eagerly.

“Just a clown nose, don’t you think? We don’t want to overdo it.”

“In a clown nose, then.”

“But wait,” Paulina said, clenching her hands. “You can’t do this. I don’t want to mop floors. I was a supervisor.” She heard herself and marvelled at how quickly she had been transformed. “I
am
a supervisor.”

“Mopping floors is an important position. Essential, even. Just think of all the used gum there. Someone could get hurt.”

“You’ll be doing a service to humanity,” Ron added. “You’ll bring joy and relief to life. That’s the company motto, isn’t it?” Ron turned to Mindy.

“We have a company motto?”

“This isn’t what I want!” Paulina cried. “My message was to elevate the masses! I never meant to be one!”

“Oh, message,” Mindy said dismissively. “Look around you—everyone has left you here alone. They just wanted a little time to vent. That’s all they ever do, really: vent and nod and go back to work. You just took yourself a little too seriously. Too personally; you took yourself too personally.”

“It’s because you stole my hair,” Paulina said, pointing her finger at Mindy. “You provoked it.”

“Nonsense. People lose their hair all the time. Strand by strand. You really can’t claim those hairs as yours once they leave your head, can you? Besides, once you start mopping, you can keep all the hairs you want.”

“That’s obvious.” Ron said agreeably.

“Anyone’s hair,” Mindy added. “Mine if you want. Just gather it up.”

“That, plus you get to keep your paycheque.”

“That’s what’s important in the long term, isn’t it? Much more important than hair or where you sit or if you’ve got great eyebrows? A paycheque.”

They began to walk away and Paulina was motionless, considering what had happened. She had gone too far, it was obvious. Asked questions of the wrong people and pushed where a push would be noticed. Such consequences were predictable, to everyone but her. She had expected too much; she thought she could stay hidden in the herd even as she ran along outside it. She was amazed at her own stupidity, grateful that she had been spared the final blow. She would take what they gave her, gratefully.

She did still have a future, after all, she told herself. She was alive. She had bills to pay, many bills to pay, and no savings worth noting. She should accept the position and begin to save money so she could protect herself; why had she cared about protecting others when they could either save themselves or perish? It would be humiliating at first, mopping around her former coworkers, who would, no doubt, shift their eyes away when they saw her. But soon enough it would be normal, even if a new kind of normal.

She had been misled by details, but she could paint on eyebrows, she supposed. She could even paint on hair. Maybe she would get a pair of eyeglasses, just to give her a sense of her new self. She would absolutely refuse the clown nose. She even suspected they were joking about it, proposing it just so they could show how easy it was for them to compromise by removing the request just to please her.

And it would please her!

The mops, she supposed were in the basement.

She turned around and headed there, quickly.

Guy and Jill were girl-twins, although Guy, of course, was male. Jill was the firstborn, hence the generic “female,” despite the genetic “male.” Their mom, a sporadic feminist, was in a highly political state following their birth. “Fraternal twins?” she scoffed. “Not these two.” Categories are essentially arbitrary, she reasoned. Guy, however, always resented it.

“You ain’t gonna girlify me when I grow up,” he declared on his sixth birthday. Jill, being bigger, smacked him solid and, although they were close despite their differences, he bit her nose.

“Nice girls!” their mommy yelled. “Nice girls don’t do that!” She was a humming kind of woman, tuneless and cheerful; already at six they wanted earphones. “What’s that
noise
?” Guy would wail; “What’s that
buzzing
?” Jill would cry.

They were signally unrepressed. They acted out all day. They were separated at school—at first by rows and then by floors, but the authorities (“There’s something off about those two!”) finally discreetly asked if medication might be better.

“God no,” their mother said. “Can you imagine them on drugs?”

They were placed in a special school, where they got in trouble by inventing games.

“See, everything we do is made ordinary by one thing,” Guy said.

“And if you don’t do that one thing, people get creeped out,” Jill elaborated. “And it’s not normal anymore, when you change one little thing. Like, we come to school, we sit down, we learn. What’s the normal thing to do?” she asked Robbie and Cheryl and Gus.

“Coming to school!” Gus crowed.

Guy shook his head. “Sitting down. If we don’t do that, it’s not normal.”

And it was true. The next day word had spread to all the special kids and when the teacher began class, the children stood. They mostly didn’t even giggle (Gus did, of course). The teacher, an old hand, played along and started teaching anyway, but lapsed into staring when they began walking around up and down the rows, eerily silent.

Everyone had to stay after school, but they agreed it was worth it. As punishment they had to clap their hands for an hour. It was a progressive special school.

“You children are too damn smart, and it’s all my fault,” their mother complained after yet another visit to the principal. “Too much protein in your early years, it was all the rage. Now it’s all spinach and kale, if only I’d known!” She fell down in an apoplexy of shame, her face on her forearm, her long, long hair in a pigtail to her waist. She would never cut her hair, she said, it was a woman’s strength. They’d have to sneak up behind her and tie her down before she’d let her power go like that.

The children cut the leaves off trees, put the wheels sideways on their friends’ skates, and insisted on eating alphabetically: apples, artichokes, almonds on Monday, bananas, butterscotch and beans on Tuesday, and, “Cake, cake, cake!” they screamed on Wednesday. Coconut cake, chocolate cake, custard cakes and more. At least it wasn’t protein, their mother thought. Wednesday was followed by donuts, dillweed and dipsy-doodles. They liked it, the alphabet, it was working out fine.

“Don’t expect much when you get to the
X
s,” their mother warned. “And you know, with Z, all we can eat is zoup!” She liked the game, being deeply suspicious by then of any nutritional standards.

They grew up addicted to trouble and attention, though they never went with the trends. No drugs, alcohol or speeding cars: those things were anonymous. And they had a wicked sense of fun. Once, Guy was arrested for running down a Canada goose, a protected species. The police came to his door, citing an eyewitness, and led him back to the scene. There was a chalk outline of a goose in the middle of the road.

“I did not commit goosicide!” Guy yelled, falsely sobbing. “I am not a goosicide!” And then he broke down totally. “It goosed me! I had to do it! I didn’t stand a chance. How many times could I let it goose me? My wife is gone, my dog is ashamed, it was an accident.”

“Office, officer,” the eyewitness said, running out from the sidelines and looking suspiciously like Jill, “it wasn’t an accident, he ran it down deliberately. I saw it all, it was a wild-goose
chase
.”

Guy’s eyes rolled in pseudo agony. “It turned its back on me and walked all loosey-goosey under my brakes. How much can a man take?”

The police officers had been silent, but now they rallied. One went to answer his squawker and the other one said, “Are you crazy, the two of you, or is this a joke? I’m here to tell you: it’ll be better if you’re crazy.”

“We got our drugs crossed,” Jill said brightly. “We’re not responsible for any of this, though technically and legally we can still drive.”

“That was the morgue,” the other officer said on his return. “It’s been dead over a day. They think a dog did it, anyway, not a car.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” his partner said grimly. “False reports. Embarrassing an officer. Let’s goose-step these two over to the station.”

They were made to do community service, cleaning golf courses of goose crap. “And don’t do nothing freaky with it,” they were told by an officer who knew them. “That stuff’s loaded with carcinogens.”

Which was all they needed to dress in latex gloves and fitted plastic bags. Guy especially was critical of carcinogens because he believed they would thin his hair.

For, truth be told, both of them were a little vain and a little flamboyant. They had an idea in their heads of their personal style, which was unique, trend setting even if the trend didn’t follow, and of course attractive and complementary. When Jill shaved her head, Guy wore wigs. When Guy penciled his eyebrows, Jill pierced her itty-bitty toe.

“Will you wear a ring on your toe in winter?” Guy asked.

“It’s for sandals only. And you know, I can draw a ribbon or a thong through the hole and wrap it around my ankle or my leg.”

Guy got his own itty-bitty toe pierced so they could thread a thong from her toe to his, Siamese twins joined at the corns, but it ripped the hole clear through on Jill’s toe and made walking impossible. That was no good. They were not much for just standing around.

They were desperate for sensation, for the new, the first, the only. They clicked their fingernails impatiently on days where nothing clicked in their brains.

And so they reached adulthood, stopping and starting, running hot and cold. They were terribly disappointed that this was all there was.

“I feel so flat today,” Jill sighed one evening. “I feel like a cardboard sign, the kind you never notice ’cause you’ve seen it a thousand times.”

“What are we supposed to do with life?” Guy agreed. “Going to school every day never worked, and now we’re supposed to work every day. How do people do that?”

“I don’t care
how
,” Jill said sulkily. “But why, why, why? Don’t they feel so carbon working like that?”

“All in a row,” Guy snorted. “Machines, pigeons, one mirror after the other.” He was silent, his fingers twitching at the air. “I’d collapse like a balloon. I wonder how they get so flat and just keep going. Doesn’t it needle them? Don’t you think it annoys them to be so organized?”

“I’m not sure they’re the same as us,” Jill countered sadly. “They’re placid, they’re like pictures of themselves—an inch deep really; less than an inch. Walking around, getting cracked at the knees.” She sat on the sofa next to her brother and put her head on his thigh. “I like looking at you from this angle. I wish I could draw; I’d do a portrait like this.”

“Any way you can draw is good enough,” he said, brightening. “Do it. Do it now.”

She couldn’t find a pencil, so she did it in ballpoint pen on the back of an envelope. The thinning dark hair, slightly wavy, cut-glass cheekbones, a somewhat snobby nose. “It’s done,” she said, frowning.

“Is that how you see me?” He was disappointed.

She held the envelope by its flap and disowned it. Her fingers formed an
O
. “No. I just have no talent at all.”

“How
do
you see me?”

“You got coloured outside the lines,” she said. “You’re bigger than life. And maybe a little bit crazy.”

“I don’t feel crazy,” he said. “Not right now. Do you ever think, maybe you don’t exist?”

She sprawled out again on the sofa, resting her head on his thigh. When she had no plans she could get very languid. “Sometimes, but mostly I wonder if other people really exist. You know, am I dreaming or pretending they’re there? Then I think, my dreams wouldn’t be so dull, and these people are dull. And they annoy me, the way they look at me sometimes, or
don’t
look at me, just knock me out of the way with their elbows. People and their damn elbows. They should look up and see me more than they do, I could scream.”

He nodded. “They don’t have anything in their brains, it’s so easy to trick them. Even the tricks are no fun, they’ve ruined that.” He looked at her. “I wonder if I could trick
you
.”

Her hands, usually so mobile, froze. “We think too much alike, how could we do it? And why? What would you prove?”

“I’m terribly bored,” he said. “And now there’s no money. I still think mom should have done the decent thing and died quickly instead of using up all the money.”

“It’s over and done with. We need a plan.”

There was a way he had of delaying when he had something special in mind, of holding it like a candy in his mouth. He was doing that now; she could tell he had a plan.

“Would you like to be a whore?” he said, as if he were asking, “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Huh,” she said, and got a little distracted. The pupils got dark and deep, he saw, as if she were looking at something in a different room. The skin on her neck caught a shadow from her chin; it looked like a line across her throat. “It’s a little—oh, sleazy, isn’t it?” Her voice was casual. “It’s a little down and dirty, isn’t it?” When he let her think about it, not answering at once, she added, “And what about you? Will you do it too?”

“Well, of course I could do it too,” he said, suddenly energized. She could feel the muscles in his thigh tighten under her cheek. “I could be one too! It will be degrading, won’t it? Shameful and defiant!” He rolled the words in his mouth. “There’s all that sensation in it—repulsion, anticipation, greed and curiosity. Maybe even a kind of triumph, a nasty triumph.”

“So many of them are kinky,” she said softly, “so many of them are strange. They have fetishes, they have little kinky dreams they want played out.”

He touched her ear with a finger gracefully arched. “Well, we like fantasy well enough, don’t we?”

“We’ll be in
their
fantasies this time. And it may be even weirder stuff for you, I don’t know. Would you do men or women?”

A little smile pulled at his lips. A small indentation like a fingerprint appeared next to his mouth. “Does it matter? No, if I started, it wouldn’t matter. We could work together sometimes, the two of us, offer ourselves as a couple.”

She flushed; it was odd to see her do it, she was never embarrassed. “Yes, once we start it, I suppose we could.”

“I would like to be frightened,” he said softly. “Totally frightened. All your senses pick up then, even if you don’t notice at the time. And you don’t notice, do you? You’re so much you, you’re a hyper-real you. The way your nerves jump all over the place, and your eyes and head are watching for every clue. Your skin prickles, your palms sweat, even your hair. . . . You don’t notice you’re living until it seems you won’t, and then each breath counts, each shake of the heart.” He ended on a whisper.

“I’m not all that crazy about being frightened,” Jill murmured. She opened the fingers of her hand and watched them spread and relax. Then her hands curled up. “If you’re frightened, then someone controls you. I don’t care for that. I don’t want to be controlled. But I want to see what happens—I mean, I like it when someone else is frightened, to see how they look, to see what they do. Some get pale, some get flushed, and you can hear it when they speak, they sort of pant. I would hate to hear that in my own voice. I don’t mind seeing their fantasies, their screwy little desires, that’s okay, they need me for that. I want to see them exposed, it’s the only time I can stand them. I like them better when they’re raw, stripped down. I could even love them, then, when their voices get so very narrow. They watch me, they have to watch me. I like that focus.”

He admired the picture she had of herself. As far as he knew, it was true. “You wouldn’t ever feel humiliated, would you?”

“Not if I have the whip hand.” She tapped him gently. “You want to be pushed to the edge; I can see that. The edge is very beautiful. But you don’t need them for that; they’d be no good, they’d never understand. They don’t have the mind for it, for real fear; they’re not special enough to give you what you want. They’re afraid of small things and that’s what they deal in. Most of them, anyway.”

“What about you?” he whispered. “If I asked, would you make me afraid?”

“Ah, Guy,” she said softly. “I don’t know. Would you be the same to me after that? Would I be the same to you?”

He flung himself off the sofa and stretched. “I’m not against change. I can’t go on like this much longer.” He became suddenly businesslike. “We have to find out where to go. We’ll have to get
things
, too, I suppose—condoms and gels; special clothes; shoes; masks; I want masks.”

“Masks,” she agreed.

“And you—feathers? Lace? Black or red?” He stood by the side of the window, against the frame, so he had a silhouette. His head turned to her from within the shadow.

“Red, I think. Are we really going to do this?”

“Can you think of a reason not to?”

She bent at the waist and grasped her ankles and released them. He suspected she had a scene revolving in her head. “Would you kill someone?” she asked.

He came back to her slowly and very gracefully. They both felt that the air had thickened around them, around them exclusively. “I don’t know; I think about if, of course. Doesn’t everyone think about it? Wonder if they could do it, when they would do it, under what circumstances. And if they would do it out of curiosity. You read about joy-killings and you think, those people are off, they don’t realize it, they’re missing something fundamental the rest of us have. And then I wonder: do I have it? Maybe I don’t; would I want it? Wouldn’t I prefer to be someone who could kill in cold blood, indifferently? After all, killing out of passion or self-preservation is hardly killing at all. I couldn’t kill a stranger, it would have to be someone I loved. That’s the real strength, isn’t it; that’s ultimate power, to be above the things you love or want, to master indifference on that scale. How else can you be truly alive?”