George Saunders: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

“Oh, get off it,” Claude says, affection for Tim shining from his dull eyes. “You’d eliminate your own mother if there was a buck in it for you.”

“Undeniably,” Tim says. “Especially if she knocked over a client trash can or turned rabid.”

Then he hands me the corporate Visa and sends me to HardwareNiche for coolers. At HardwareNiche you can get a video of Bloodiest Crimes of the Century Reenacted. You can get a video of Great Bloopers made during the filming of Bloodiest Crimes of the Century Reenacted. You can get a bird feeder that plays “How Dry I Am” while electronically emitting a soothing sensation birds love. You can get a Chill’n’Pray, an overpriced cooler with a holographic image of a famous religious personality on the lid. I opt for Buddha. I can almost hear Tim sarcastically comparing our girths and asking since when has cost control been thrown to the wind. But the Chill’n’Prays are all they’ve got. I’m on Tim’s shit list if I do and on Tim’s shit list if I don’t. He has an actual shit list. Freeda generated it and enhanced it with a graphic of an angry piece of feces stamping its feet.

I buy the coolers, hoping in spite of myself that he’ll applaud my decisiveness. When I get back to the office everyone’s gone for the night. The Muzak’s off for a change and loud whacks and harsh words are floating up from the basement via the heat ducts. Before long Tim tromps up the stairs swearing. I hide pronto. He shouts thanks for nothing, and says he could have had more rough-and-tumble fun dangling a cat over a banister, and that there’s nothing duller than a clerk with the sexual imagination of a grape.

“Document placement and retrieval specialist,” Freeda says in a hurt tone.

“Whatever,” Tim says, and speeds off in his Porsche.

I emerge overwhelmed from my cubicle. Over her shoulder and through the plate glass is a shocked autumnal moon. Freeda’s cheek is badly bruised. Otherwise she’s radiant with love. My mouth hangs open.

“What can I say?” she says. “I can’t get enough of the man.”

“Good night,” I say, and forget about my car, and walk the nine miles home in a daze.

All day Wednesday I prepare to tell Tim off. But I’m too scared. Plus he could rightly say she’s a consenting adult. What business is it of mine? Why defend someone who has no desire to be defended? Instead I drop a few snots in his coffee cup and use my network access privileges to cancel his print jobs. He asks can I work late and in spite of myself I fawningly say sure. I hate him. I hate myself. Everybody else goes home. Big clouds roll in. I invoice like mad. Birds light on the Dumpster and feed on substances caked on the lid. What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.

Just after seven I hear him shout: “You, darling, will rot in hell, with the help of a swift push to the grave from me!” At first I think he’s pillow-talking with Freeda by phone. Then I look out the window and see the animal rights girl at the lip of our pit with a camcorder.

Admirable dedication, I think, wonderful clarity of vision.

Tim runs out the door with his blackjack unsheathed.

What to do? Clearly he means her harm. I follow him, leaving behind my loafers to minimize noise. I keep to the shadows and scurry in my socks from tiny berm to tiny berm. I heave in an unattractive manner. My heart rate’s in the ionosphere. To my credit I’m able to keep up with him. Meanwhile she’s struggling up the slope with her hair in sweet disarray, backlit by a moon the color of honey, camcorder on her head like some kind of Kenyan water jug.

“Harlot,” Tim hisses, “attempted defiler of my dream,” and whips his blackjack down. Am I quick? I am so quick. I lunge up and take it on the wrist. My arm bone goes to mush, and my head starts to spin, and I wrap Tim up in a hug the size of Tulsa.

“Run,” I gasp to the girl, and see in the moonlight the affluent white soles of her fleeing boat-type shoes.

I hug hard. I tell him drop the jack and to my surprise he does. Do I then release him? To my shame, no. So much sick rage is stored up in me. I never knew. And out it comes in one mondo squeeze, and something breaks, and he goes limp, and I lay him gently down in the dirt.

I CPR like anything. I beg him to rise up and thrash me. I do a crazy little dance of grief. But it’s no good.

I’ve killed Tim.

I sprint across 209 and ineffectually drag my bulk around Industrial Grotto, weeping and banging on locked corporate doors. United Knee Wrap’s having a gala. Their top brass are drunkenly lip-synching hits of the fifties en masse and their foot soldiers are laughing like subservient fools, so no one hears my frantic knocking. I prepare to heave a fake boulder through the plate glass. But then I stop. By now Tim’s beyond help. What do I gain by turning myself in? Did I or did I not save an innocent girl’s life? Was he or was he not a cruel monster? What’s done is done. My peace of mind is gone forever. Why spend the remainder of my life in jail for the crime of eliminating a piece of filth?

And standing there outside the gala I learn something vital about myself: when push comes to shove, I could care less about lofty ideals. It’s me I love. It’s me I want to protect.

Me.

I hustle back to the office for the burial gear. I roll Tim into the pit. I sprinkle on lime and cover him with dirt. I forge a letter in which he claims to be going to Mexico to clarify his relationship with God via silent meditation in a rugged desert setting.

“My friends,” I write through tears in his childish scrawl, “you slave away for minimal rewards! Freedom can be yours if you open yourself to the eternal! Good health and happiness to you all. I’m truly sorry for any offense I may have given. Especially to you, Freeda, who deserved a better man than the swine I was. I am a new man now, and Freeda dear, I suggest counseling. Also: I have thought long and hard on this, and have decided to turn over the reins to Jeffrey, whom I have always wrongly maligned. I see now that he is a man of considerable gifts, and ask you all to defer to him as you would to me.”

I leave the letter on Claude’s chair and go out to sleep in my car. I dream of Tim wearing a white robe in a Mexican cantina. A mangy dog sits on his lap explaining the rules of the dead. No weeping. No pushing the other dead. Don’t bore everyone with tales of how great you were. Tim smiles sweetly and rubs the dog behind the ears. He sees me and says no hard feelings and thanks for speeding him on to the realm of bliss.

I wake with a start. The sun comes up, driving sparrows before it, turning the corporate reflective windows wild with orange. I roll out of my car and brush my teeth with my finger.

My first day as a killer.

I walk to the pit in the light of fresh day, hoping it was all a dream. But no. There’s our scuffling footprints. There’s the mound of fresh dirt, under which lies Tim. I sit on a paint can in a patch of waving weeds and watch my colleagues arrive. I weep. I think sadly of the kindly humbler I used to be, bleary-eyed in the morning, guiltless and looking forward to coffee.

When I finally go in, everyone’s gathered stunned around the microwave.

“El Presidente,” Claude says disgustedly.

“Sorry?” I say.

I make a big show of shaking my head in shock as I read and reread the note I wrote. I ask if this means I’m in charge. Claude says with that kind of conceptual grasp we’re not exactly in for salad days. He asks Freeda if she had an inkling. She says she always knew Tim had certain unplumbed depths but this is ridiculous. Claude says he smells a rat. He says Tim never had a religious bone in his body and didn’t speak a word of Spanish. My face gets red. Thank God Blamphin, that toady, pipes up.