A long time ago, I was working on what I think of as my second book. It was about pizza, more or less, but also a good 25% of it was this whole other story I wanted to tell at the same time, because I frequently allow my reach to exceed my grasp, especially when it comes to marrying my silly literary ideas to one another. Anyway, the pizza book will (someday) be just the pizza book, and that whole other story will either be its own something else or just lost to the failure of my imagination to find the proper container for it. So here is what was once the second chapter of my second book, and now just serves as an introduction to a story I might someday want to tell for its own merits, whatever those might be.
The Beginning.
“Fuck.”
Ralph cursed under his breath, standing in line at the Employment Bureau, filling in the blanks on page eleven of a twenty-seven page form, poked hard in the ribs.
“What was that for?”
“For swearing at the employment office,” Edgar said. “Step up, the line's moving.”
“The line is not moving, it hasn't moved in an eon, it's not going to move—also, no, you poked me and then I said 'fuck,' not the other way around.” He shuffled forward half a step.
“Yeah, well, I knew you were going to curse, and now you've done it twice.”
“The second one wasn't a curse, I was just quoting myself, it doesn't count. Also, you can't have known—”
“Doesn't count? Either you said it or you didn't, and you did say it. Twice.”
“You know what I mean. And you're missing the point, anyway—you can't have poked me in the ribs for swearing because I hadn't sworn yet.”
“Your linear-temporal notion of causality and free will is clearly hampering your ability to understand this. Just accept it and step up, the line's moving. You'll understand better after you get this job, assuming you get this job.”
Ralph shuffled forward another half step, the line in front of him as long as it had been five minutes ago, as long as it had been five years ago, as best he could tell. He wanted to continue the fight with Edgar, but in the laminated brown drabness of the unemployment bureau it was difficult to muster the indignation to stand up straight, much less call forth the disdain to win an argument that lacked meaning, direction, and the potential for resolution, even by their standards.
There were dozens and dozens and dozens of people in line, maybe hundreds, maybe more, snaking in and around and among each other through the waist-high corrals. Everyone in line seemed to be talking, but Ralph couldn't make out any of their words, just a haze of murmured grumblings and complaints, the tiled floors and tiled high ceilings and distant walls conspiring to deprive all the consonants and vowels of their recognizable starts and stops, the room cloudy with syllabic ambiguity.
“Whatever,” Ralph said, with a sort of reverse sniffle, a tiny bray of dismissal. “You didn't have to hit me.”
“And have your obscenity go unpunished? Allow it to hang in the air like an unspanked ass, poised to produce the profane unchecked until proper discourse has been permanently upended—”
“Your alliteration is making me nauseous. Just be quiet.”
“I'm being quiet. But I can't be silent in the face of your apparent disregard for the principle of balance, of my role in the cosmic see-saw of justice—”
“You hit me first!” Ralph said, loud enough to momentarily silence half a dozen people in every direction, twenty or thirty people spoked out around them now looking inward, the focal hub of a sudden shared curiosity, that weird group shame for a person who has inexpertly stepped outside the unwritten rules of publicly acceptable behavior, if only for a second.
“You're really going to have to learn to control your temper. Maybe that sort of outburst is okay, maybe even helpful, for a plumber, but you're not a plumber anymore. I don't think 'anger-management problem' is a phrase you want me slipping in when they call me for a personal character reference,” Edgar said.
“I'll be fine, as long as you're not around. And they never call the references, anyway. And despite the title, it's hardly as drastic a change as it seems. As best I can tell, I'll be going from plumber to what amounts to a sort of glorified landlord, or a building super. Just another job nobody ever thinks about until something goes spectacularly wrong.”
“It's more like a lab technician than a landlord. And don't be silly—I think about you every single time I take a shit. Have for many, many years.”
“Now who's being obscene?”
“Hardly—you could learn something from my sacrosanct bowel movements. The principle of pan-harmonic universal balance, defined in stark reality every time I sit on the toilet.” They shuffled forward another step.
“Can you just stop talking? I'm trying to finish this paperwork, and I may only have another three weeks or so before we get to the front of the line.”
“I didn't come so I could stand here silently. You asked me to keep you company. I'm doing you the favor, here, buddy.”
“I know, I know. My mistake. Just, for a minute, shut up.”
“Fine. But for fuck's sake, step up—the line's moving.”
~~~
Three-hundred and forty-three thousand years later Ralph and Edgar stood in front of window seven, staring at the woman seated at the desk, bleary and hollow. She flipped through the paperwork Ralph slid through the slot at the base of the window, set it aside, placed her hands on the keyboard in front of her, and looked up, blank, bleary, hollow. The nameplate on her desk read Irene.
“Name?”
“Ralph Drangom.”
“Spelling?”
Ralph spelled his name aloud. Irene typed it out.
“Position applied for?”
“Um. Isn't it all there, on that paperwork?”
“Position applied for?”
He looked at Edgar, who shrugged and raised his eyebrows. Ralph answered the question. Irene typed it out.
“Previous employment?”
“I'm a—I was a plumber. I'm sorry—did I not fill out the forms correctly?”
Irene typed his answer on the keyboard, watching the screen. She exhaled and looked up.
“Look—” she glanced down at her screen “—Ralph. This will go much easier if you just answer the questions. I ask, you answer, I type.” She blinked at Edgar, maybe trying to bring him in on the sell, possibly just seeing him for the first time.
“It's actually a very efficient system.” She smiled politely, sort of in their direction.
Ralph stared at her.
“For how many years, including training and apprenticeship, were you—” her eyes flicked back up a line “—a plumber?”
“Fourteen years.”
“Voluntary departure, terminated, or made redundant?”
“Voluntary.”
“Your Cumulative Assessment Index Rating as a plumber?”
“Well, it peaked two years ago at four-for—”
“Just the final C.A.I.R. number, please.”
“Right. Three-eighty-nine.”
“Reason for interest—”
“But my C.A.I.R. only slipped because of a few silly mistakes, mostly because I was bored—”
“That's fine, Mr. Drangom. Three-eighty-nine is a perfectly acceptable score. Reason for interest—”
“I'm a very capable plumber, is all I'm saying. If you look at the individual cases, there are very few serious mistakes, and really only two catastrophic errors, and nothing that I wasn't able to fix.”
“A three-eighty-nine will not preclude you—”
“Eventually. I mean, fix it, eventually.”
“—from any opportunities moving forward, and is a good bit above average. Not that it matters, as only the number itself matters. Or, in your case, the number does not matter, beyond the fact that it qualifies you for the position to which you are applying, rendering itself kind of beside the point. But we're getting sidetracked, aren't we? Reason for interest in changing professions?”
“Well, I completed the eight-year post-training minimum and—”
“Completion of the imposed requirements to which you're beholden by accepting training and placement is not a reason for wanting to change professions,” Irene said. “It is a necessary condition of being permitted to change professions.”
“Um. Right.”
“Reason for interest in changing professions?”
“Like I marked on the paperwork, there's no particular reason. Nothing I can point to, I don't think.”
“The more specific you can be, the easier it will be to get what you want.” Irene said this with a slightly lowered voice and a glance to either side of her desk, aiming for conspiratorial, sounding and looking more like a tactician than a cohort.
Ralph sighed.
“I'm just tired of plumbing, I guess. I haven't encountered a new problem in four or five years. It's always the same thing, putting the same jigsaw puzzle together over and over every day, the same pieces that always fit the same way, whether you start with the edges or work from the inside out it's the same thing, no matter what coffee table you're putting the thing together on, the same answers to the same questions, and it's just a matter of staring blankly at the pieces until you remember where it belongs, and it's not like the questions were all that interesting in the first place.”
“The trajectory of your C.A.I.R. score hardly indicates such rote mastery of—”
“I thought you said the score didn't matter!”
“No, you're right, it doesn't. I was merely trying to make conversation. Unprofessional. I apologize.”
“He's a little sensitive about the three-eighty-nine, Irene. Best to just move on, probably,” Edgar offered helpfully, and smiled at Ralph.
Irene smiled an embarrassed half-frown and looked to her screen.
“So you're no longer deriving satisfaction from the successful application of your training and experience to the problems with which you're presented on a daily basis?” she asked.
“That's a fair way of putting it.”
“Would it be fair to say that your interest in changing professions, then, is rooted,” Irene glanced to her screen, reading from a list of available responses, “in an existential crisis arising from a lack of meaningful challen—”
Edgar bark-laughed.
“'Crisis' is a bit strong,” Ralph said.
“Wait, this 'existential crisis' shit was one of the possible reasons listed, and you didn't pick it?”
“Well, it seems a bit more serious than 'Generalized boredom due to repetitive nature of daily tasks,'” Irene said, reading from her screen. “And I don't think you're quite to 'Creeping despondent nihilism as a result of flagging certitude of personal existential worth stemming from meaninglessness (perceived) of daily tasks.”
“Fine. Go with the middle one. The existential crisis. But I think there ought to be something between 'bored' and 'existential crisis.'”
“So now the twenty-seven-page questionnaire isn't detailed enough?” Edgar asked. “You're an ocean of such complicated and mysterious depth that not even a form at the Employment Bureau can adequately grasp—”
“We're just trying to get as complete a picture of the situation as possible,” Irene said. “It's not perfect, but it helps with the job placement.”
“Right. Sorry. Sorry about that, er, about him. What's the next question?”
“Don't apologize for me, Ralph. She almost smiled. I nearly amused you for a second, I think, didn't I, Irene?”
“I don't think so, though it's hard to be certain,” Irene said. “I can't say that I'm amused right now, but it's possible I nearly was, briefly.”
“Can we just move on, please?”
Irene looked to her screen.
“Before you became dissatisfied with your work as a plumber, did you find gratification in the act of working towards solutions of problems, or did you only find gratification once the problem was successfully solved?”
“Yes—both, I mean.” Ralph sighed again. “I really don't understand why I have to go through all this. It's on those sheets of paper, right there.”
“As we've established, the answers you provided on the paperwork while standing in line are not entirely reliable.”
“I guess things tend to change a bit over the course of an eon.”
“Very good, Mr.—” her eyes flashed up and down the screen again, nearly imperceptibly, with practiced and purposeful precision, programmed for optimal politeness and personalization, “—Drangom, very good. Perhaps you can bring this monolithic and mechanistic bureaucracy of staggering inefficiency to its knees by the sheer uniqueness and pithiness of your cutting commentary on its intrinsic flaws, none of which, I can assure you, have ever been pointed out to me before. Or, perhaps, you can answer the questions as I ask them, and allow, at your pleasure and by your grace, the wheels to grind slowly ever on.”
“I'm sorry. I just don't understand why, if the answers on the questionnaire are known to be unreliable, anyone has to fill them out at all.”
Irene sighed.
“We've found that those in line, when subjected to a considerable wait with nothing to occupy themselves, grow restless and begin to...act out. Not everyone brings a, ahh, friend, as you have. So we assign a task, one that we thought could potentially have the added benefit of speeding up the process here, at the window. As it turns out, the paperwork is usually too rife with hedging and inaccuracies for us to get the complete picture we're looking for, and aside from the mollifying effect I just mentioned, is rendered irrelevant—a mollifying effect which is then negated and often reversed by the sudden realization of the seeming practicality deficit of having spent so long filling out the suddenly-revealed-to-be-irrelevant forms. But, by then, you're not in line to disrupt anyone else, so it's a cost we're willing to bear, even as your disillusionment with the process boils over into the inevitable, if understandable, voiced frustration that protracts the process by another ten to fifteen percent, which led to the lengthening of the paperwork so as to keep those still in line occupied ten to fifteen percent longer. While on the surface the system may appear to have a few built-in inefficiencies, smile politely, we can assure you that your experience, if not perhaps the expeditious adventure you were expecting when you arrived at the Employment Bureau earlier today, has been carefully calibrated over many years to maximize our ability to serve your needs.”
“Did you just—were you reading that?” Ralph asked.
“I'm sorry?”
“You said, 'smile politely' there, near the end. Was that—do you, I mean, there's a script for this part, too?”
“Are you sure I didn't actually smile politely, rather than say it?”
“Yes. I mean, pretty sure.”
Irene smiled politely.
“You have to understand, your gripes here are hardly uncommon. Prepared responses help expedite things. And not to belabor the point, but one reason the line is so long is that you have so many questions about the line, and the paperwork, and everything else. If you'll just answer the questions as I ask them, you'll be expediting things for yourself and the others in line behind you.” Irene said, all sexless placidity and the bored patience of someone who knows it doesn't matter how long this takes.
“The line wasn't long because I'm asking questions now, though,” Ralph said. “I mean, no matter how long I stand here—”
“Are we really going to have that conversation again?” Edgar wanted to know, “Because you're still wrong.”
“I wasn't wrong before and I'm not wrong now—there's no way that my asking questions about this process can have any impact whatsoever on the line that I was standing in all day. Granted, I'm not making things any easier on the people behind us, but that doesn't change the fact of what actually happened earlier today.”
“You know, Ralph, sometimes it helps to consider one's actions in terms of the greater social context, rather than merely—”
“I understand that! But I refuse to accept that my asking questions now is what caused me to wait in line all day.”
“I tried to explain it to him earlier, Irene, but he's got some pretty radical ideas about time and causality.”
“Well, a slight solipsistic impulse never hurt anybody in the line of work you're trying to get into, and might actually be helpful.” Irene said. “Now, Mr. Drangom, I have noted your criticisms of the process, and your feedback will be filed and considered at the next semi-annual meeting of the Efficiencies Committee, a meeting you are, as a member of the Bureau, absolutely welcome to attend. In the meantime, let's finish up this interview! You'll be enjoying your satisfying new career before you know it.”
Ralph didn't object. Irene smiled, politely.
“Good. Now, what spurred your interest in working as a work-from-home technician for the Experimental Laboratories Division?”
And on, and on. And on.
~~~
Ralph sat on the edge of his couch, in front of his coffee table, a bit unsettled by the non-dimensionality of the anti-space void all around him. He'd gotten home from the Employment Bureau last night and gone straight to bed and dreamed of stopped pipes and sink traps and irrational objects clogging impossibly small and improbably large drains, as he had for years.
He woke up as he had every morning for the last few years, with a sort of comfortable dread about the coming day. When he'd noticed the years skipping by in indistinguishable chunks despite the days dragging out interminably into weeks and months, that was when he decided to look into getting out of the plumbing business. As the Bureau afforded Ralph, and everyone else, the opportunity to change careers with relative ease, the biggest hurdle wasn't making the change, it was realizing that he needed one. It wasn't until halfway through his shower that Ralph remembered he wouldn't be plumbing today, that today he started his new job. The dread burned off and he was hungry for breakfast for the first time in longer than he could remember. He rinsed with vigor. He ate oatmeal and half a grapefruit.
Irene had awarded him the new career on the spot, after a few hundred more questions and several more geological ages had elapsed, and given him a pile of introductory materials: a list of standards and expectations, a manual and handbook, a timetable for reports to be filed, a notebook for recording the first few of those reports, two dozen other briefs and outlines, all officially titled and deemed important and entirely unread.
Ralph sat on the edge of his couch, the Nullifier that the Bureau had provided humming quietly on the coffee table in front of him, next to a glass of water, displacing the universe with nothingness or anti-nothingness or nega-space or some other absurdity detailed on the back of the box. He opened the manual, flipped past the publishing information pages, the contents pages, the acknowledgments, the introduction. He stopped at Chapter 1: Getting Started. He read for a minute and put the book down on the table, face down to mark the page, and noticed the requisite blurbs on the back, quotes he hadn't bothered to read earlier.
The praise was effusive, naturally enough, if a bit unnecessary, as purchasing the book was a compulsory requirement of taking the job. Just there to encourage him to really read it, Ralph guessed.
“The best how-to for construction and maintenance that I've yet found. An essential companion for the novice Experimental Labs tech.” Also: “If only this had been available when I got started in this business—the disasters, the calamities, the pain and suffering I could have avoided inflicting! Took me from seeming terrifically angry and malevolent to perceived mild indifference in just one read.” And: “Just loaded with the sort of advice that every first-time Ex-Labs technician needs, and a helpful refresher for the seasoned vet eager to avoid the mistakes of the first few go-rounds. Wholeheartedly endorsed.” And, finally: “Benevolence has never been easier. A must-read for the aspiring career-oriented Ex-Labs tech.”
Ralph picked up the book and re-read the first couple of pages. He put it down again and took a breath, a sip of water. He spoke, quietly and unsteadily, into the not-even-emptiness around him.
“Let there be...light?”
Ralph leaned back on his couch. He watched as a universe ballooned into being, dimensionality and dimensions springing forth into sudden space as light tried to outpace his ability to imagine a place for it to go. It wouldn't.
He sat on his couch and watched the universe cooling around him, sloughing off epochs like dying skin, hurtling violently apart and inevitable, unwritten laws followed for the first time, galaxies spinning away in swirling clouds of stellar mayhem.
“So far, so good,” he said.
And it was.
~~~
But maybe I should start a bit nearer the end.
