Hob Broun - Inner Tube

“It’s focus,” Sonny instructs, “not lung power.”

And learning to settle for less means learning to shut up. Okay. That’s a new job.

THE URGE TO BUY terrorizes you. I saw this in spray paint on a viaduct this morning and it turned me right over. A merciless conditioning network and nowhere to hide. Depths of torment and compulsion, a moment’s relief at the checkout counter before beginning all over again.

Into this concept, as I drove, everything seemed to fit. Cacti became part of a bar-b-q sauce label; rock formations were objects to be conquered with the latest in climbers’ gear. I passed children playing around a woodpile and they seemed like little tools designed to open, like secret agents of color film and popsicles. Anywhere I looked there were nothing but commodities. To feel, even to breathe, was to consume.

Approaching the facility at half speed, window-shopping along, I ran up on new product. Delusions of the marketplace, poisonous beguilements. There was no getting without some giving up. And so nothing felt strange or uncomfortable anymore since artificial flavors, recreations, and synthetics were all over and done with by way of complete acceptance. Safe as milk. Our bulwark was the imitation of life.

One of those days. I was too full of ideas and should have gone home to Golconda, where people know me better. But I went to my minimart of a desk, which was exactly as I had left it: rubber brontosaurus, eyedrops, yellow water pistol, rolling papers, coupons, dog skull, lockknife, cards. The console was dusty with ashes and the swivel chair’s indentations were mine and mine alone. Looking things over, I felt likable. I read my last bit of paperwork.

Annotations: JUGGERNUAT (docu-special re: US industrial birth). Still photos, Ellis Island. Proud past, our heritage of strength./Steam power. Railroad, shipping $$$/ Smokestacks & brick kilns (male & female). / Soft-eyed girl in knitting mill. White spools. Narrator: “The pathos of drudging children.”

Exactly as I’d left it. Except that some someone had printed below: “Who asked you? History — we used to grow plants, now we work in them.”

Who asked me? Who wrote large in red felt pen? I won’t fret about it because that is precisely what they want me to do. Devious but not subtle. As stringent as these overseers try to be, one must be lenient in return, slack. Dispassion denies panic and leaves no marks.

“It has your sound, your style,” Ellen says. “Maybe you wrote it yourself and forgot.”

“Possible but not plausible.”

We are picnicking on the floor of a subarchive editing room, her smoked turkey sandwiches and my thermos of margaritas. Lighting is recessed, the air chilly, this bat cave atmosphere just what we’re after.

The barometer lately has been on the rise, a high pressure system. Blooming like a dark stain, ire emerged from between the lines of First Tier memoranda. There were spot checks and speedups; there were interviews conducted by a team of “outside consultants,” all of whom wore the same indecipherable lapel pin. Rumors cascaded: an investigation by the SEC, a takeover bid from Coca-Cola, top execs on the brink of indictment for peddling high-tech designs to the Soviets. So now oblique looks are everywhere. People comb their offices for bugs, erase tapes, shred paper. They talk of exposure and reprisal. Karen Silkwood’s name has come up.

Cage behavior, Ellen has called it, in reference to the aberrations shown by animals long in captivity. But then everyone is entitled to deal with pressure in ways of her own. She, for example, has altered her hair; now garish red and cropped close, it looks filched from the costume trunk of a Peruvian circus.

“Don’t you wonder,” I ask, “why you’ve been assigned to do nothing but watch Channel Tomorrow?”

Channel Tomorrow is a pirate cable operation out of Baja California which televises a mix of industrial films, gay pornography, and political harangues from an old man in safari clothes. He bellows and whispers and twirls a leather quirt. Behind him are gilt-edged chromoliths of Qaddafi and Pol Pot.

“I’m like a hick,” Ellen says. “Suspicious but not curious.”

“One out of two isn’t bad.”

She bends a crust of pumpernickel into a bridge and walks two fingers over and back.

“Thousands and thousands of hours going nowhere,” she says. “Still, I remember my first sight of this place. I’d slept all the way on the plane coming out and this was like more dreamland. Ancient wisdom, a temple in the sun. I promised myself a life all wired up and painless. Some schmaltz, huh?”

Janos, the editor who goes with the room, comes in with his lunch on a tray, potato salad and four milks.

“The good life for five minutes,” he says, looking at our white cloth spread on his floor. Janos bounced paving stones off the oncoming tanks in Budapest in 1956. His loyal father, withstanding purges and Party shakeouts, still maintains himself as a regional minister of state fisheries. After thirty years in America, most of them in Hollywood, Janos should retain his Slavic sense of machination and deceit, a decoding ability lodged in the genes.

His big insight on the recent intrigues? “For worker ant there is only work and ignore the rest.”

“Worker ants are female,” Ellen says helpfully. “Without exception.”

Janos flips a toggle and monitors blink on, burning squares in a crossword. With the logical elegance of bones, across and down, the images are locked together and the puzzle solves itself, saying: Have a stylish face. Drive a shiny car. Working in reverse, it is possible to retrieve the clues. These are the contradictions, the things not shown. They have no shape unless taken one at a time, saying: Where is the prize? What are the rules? Who asked you?

Janos is describing the Navajo pollen paintings that he bought only last week from the artist himself. He praises their sophistication of design. Ellen listens with interest, compressing her lips. For art of this quality, he says, it was a deal.

I slip out without their noticing, the liquor coming and going in my head like surf. Something in common there. Maybe they even like each other. So what to do after the art discussion is over? No sense in it. But who says you have to do anything? Being attractive, just being pleasant — more buying and selling is all. Selfish. I should track back to the Golconda and give all these words a rest, but instead I prowl.

This passageway, curving downward, ramplike, frightens me a little by being empty. Somewhere nearby is the pistol range where Delvino practices; and on weekends he goes out hunting snakes with a Buntline. Delvino, whom I’d run from if I saw him now, or bash his face. These nude gray walls, the rusty smell (steam pipes? but there aren’t any), are like this little door here with the red light above — they remind me of school. School in late afternoon when halls lengthen, empty rooms and stairwells whisper, and you sense the gathered madness which noise covers during the day. The red bulb reflected in gray paint is like blood underwater. When I put my ear to the little door, I can hear relays clicking inside; I can envision ceramic insulators and copper switches, strands of wire lashed thickly together into color-coded muscle. Simple schematics that function in darkness, while up above in offices whose tinted windows filter sunlight there are short circuits, a chaos of fear and rumor, a fixation on security.

The passage levels off and angles to the left. I intersect buried waste ducts: soup, suds, the urine of receptionists. I cross the path of coaxial cable. Things converge at this depth, a good spot for sabotage. More echoes of school. Small resentful boy.