The flight attendants warn against running and swinging their satchels. The Settlement adults are somber, life’s accumulated political realities weighing down the corners of their mouths.
Buckled in, the kids look out the windows and point. They wait. They watch other passengers snapping the overhead compartment doors shut. They giggle about the air vents and pamphlet pictures of people sliding out of the jet’s doors on slides into the sea.
Then, in due time, the plane lifts off, up, up, and up.
The flight attendants do a bit more scolding when they roll along the wagons of beverages and nuts. Settlement kids are too perky. The fourteen zhoop-zhooping kazoos are definitely not a hit.
Secret Agent Jane wears her heart-shaped glasses and her chin held high. Today for the first time she feels herself to be one of the Settlement. You know, life. Us versus them. It’s always been so.
See all the mikes! Hear all the networks and see the press corps leaning inward . . . their important rustling . . . their rapid-fire clear voices asking yet another question of Duotron Lindsey International’s infamous CEO Bruce Hummer, who, yet again, has laid off more thousands, is headed out of this country in search of the cheap, the “willing tos.” See Bruce Hummer’s infamous face tilting slightly as if to chew a piece off the largest mike. See his hard jaw working into knots as he listens to another question. Hear his answers fall over the miles of a nation, like velvet. The face grows. Fills the screen.
Growth! Growth! Growth! Growth!
The global quantity of available work is shrinking—this being a structural problem related directly to the passing of control over crucial economic factors from the representative institutions of government to the free play of market forces . . . Hans Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, economic experts of Der Speigel, calculate that if the present trend continues unabated, 20 percent of the global (potential) workforce will suffice “to keep the economy going” (whatever that means), which will leave the other 80 percent of the able-bodied population of the world economically redundant.¶¶¶¶
The screen seems to be blank.
So yesterday off they went, them who were going to Livingston, Texas. Not me. Gordie and I and Rick went over to Rex’s place. John Lungren followed in the lumber truck so he could do a delivery afterward. We ate Rex’s ma’s cookies out on their porch, which is glass instead of screens. Rain was smashing down on the flagstones leading to the porch and it sounded like a bunch of guys stomping on the porch roof. And even though we hadn’t gotten wicked wet coming in, we all smelled like rain.
One of Rex’s most devoted “men,” some kid about fourteen or fifteen, was lurking around in the shadows of the kitchen that was lit only by a wall lamp over the sink.
The rest of us out on the little porch were talking about the militia movement . . . our favorite subject, heh-heh.
This stuff really boils my blood . . . the farm crisis. Somewhat mostly in the 1980s, in which the government and banks manipulated the force of gravity. Now it is no longer called a crisis, just a commonplace occurrence of farm auctions, the equipment, the land, the life and suicides made to not look like suicides. Politicians call it natural selection. You know how migratory birds smash into the guy wires of tall towers. Smart birds would fly around them, so the maggot-assed politicians say of both birds and men.
So John Lungren who is always packin’, he is gazing out at the rain that’s driving down on the other side of the glass. He’s going back and forth in one of Rex’s glider chairs. He says, “It’s like McDonald’s brags of the 200-billionth gray burger being sold, these agribiz lobbyists and their puppets, they see a farmer’s life as just another gray burger.” And somehow his revolver is magically in his hand, his thumb on the action, aimed out into that silver sheet of hard drizzle, and I’m like feeling it in my arm, wrist, my clenched teeth . . . the burning . . . and maybe the hottest part of my rage is how so many millions of two-leggeds in this nation of delusions thinks such a feeling is not normal. Hell, it’s normal. It is love for your fellow man, and I don’t call the oligos men.
John slips the firearm back in his shirt and I’m wondering a lot of things.
Can I tell you a little something about myself?
In this drawer of my desk are three hundred Nembutals. You see, when you have a magic wand, when you are almighty, you can get anything you desire. Merchandise-wise.
Sometimes I line the nameless bottles up and they look cheerful. Helpful friends in amber plastic. I twist one of the caps off. I sniff the contents. Once I ran a big glass of water to prepare.
The only thing that stops me is that I would be found with wet pants and a goofy look on my face. But that is coming not to matter anymore.
Okay, I have told you about myself. More than I intended. Fortunately, you can’t hear me. No one can. This office is the ultimate desolate place.
The screen remains blank and dumbstruck.
** High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program.
†† Battle dress uniform.
‡‡ Growth.
§§ Don’t forget the character list at the back of book. ☺
¶¶ This is Gordon’s neighbor Brianna Vandermast.
*** This is Bonnie Loo St. Onge.
††† This is Claire St. Onge.
‡‡‡ Big-band leader of the 1930s–1950s, along with his brother Jimmy.
