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

Connie comes in and I tell her I’m a Table Boy. She says it serves me right. She takes off her blouse and says that in spite of being bombarded with rocks, Corbett’s decided to stay, and desires Bookish Queen Mother instead of the scheduled Ferryman’s Mentally Feeble Daughter. She asks if by way of apology I’ll help her suit up. I tell her no way She puts on a push-up bra and a fake ermine robe and some horn-rims. She says Corbett’s better than most, in that he’s nonabusive and buys her gifts off the record. She says she thinks he’s fallen for her. I accuse her of self-delusion. I ask her to reconsider for my sake and not have sex with him.

She takes my face between her hands.

“I am never, ever starving or being made a fool of again,” she says. “No matter what. I’ll sleep with the entire universe before I ever pick up another horse turd in a bucket.”

Then she goes out the door and the Ramirez twins cross themselves in tandem and take out their checkerboard.

The Gleasons are regulars. They’ve got a tidy nest egg that allows them to patronize us three times a year. Mr. Gleason’s an undertaker. When the first wave of mass death swept over the Northeast he got rich by inventing the Mobile Embalmer. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of chemistry could preserve a loved one on the spot, and for a fraction of the cost associated with traditional methods.

I go in wearing my Table Boy duds and he’s stretched out on a couch being fed grapes by Lydia Bell, a closet radical feminist born without eyelids who’s always telling me about her secret plan to eventually slaughter some male Clients. For now she’s saving like crazy and biding her time. She gets revenge in small ways, like leaving bits of stem on Gleason’s grapes. Every time she does it she gives me a look. Gleason doesn’t notice because he’s too busy miming licking her navel whenever she reaches for her eye-drops.

After the Feast we all hustle down to the walk-in as usual to wolf down the leftovers. Before long Gleason comes wandering in drunk with a gravy splotch on his tunic and gives a speech about how fair free enterprise is. He asks what percentage of us are Flawed. I say all. He says the fact that we’re not at each other’s throats fighting for our daily bread but instead are squatting in a walk-in enjoying food he’s paid for is testimony to the workability of this beautiful system. He leers and asks Lydia if she’d like to do some grape-feeding in a less formal setting.

Then the Perimeter Violation Alarm sounds. Lydia rushes out ahead of me, gnawing on a roaster and shading her lidless eyes. Per specs we dash to the front gate, where a dozen members of Austerity are singing minor-key hymns and throwing buckets of black paint at our retaining wall. As usual one of them is dressed as Death Eating Chips to protest the reemergence of wasteful packaging practices. Austerity considers us decadent. They hate the fact that we market opulence. They kill a cow per family per year and use every single part. They make candles from the bone marrow and pudding from the brains. They boil the fat to make soap and use the leftovers to grease their looms. Their faces are pale and they have bony knuckles from so often going around with their fists clenched. The women all look depressed and wear bonnets. In their camps everybody works. The children work and the elderly work and the handicapped work. At one camp they had a baldheaded lunatic who paced and paced while reciting Browning, so they tethered him to the water well and he wore a circular trough into the ground, but not before producing hundreds of useful gallons.

They’re screaming up at us to reduce our Clients’ per capita caloric intake. They’re imploring us to refuse our allocated narcotics so we can see the power structure more clearly. They’re calling us brothers and sisters and asking why we honor the very mind-set responsible for the world’s sorry state.

Oberlin’s screaming back that they’re only austere because they’ve got no other options. Gerard, Oberlin’s behemoth Security stooge, says let’s turn the firehoses on the loudmouths. I fall in with the others and we wrestle the hose to the top of the wall. Gerard turns on the water and we blast Austerity back to tree line. Death Eating Chips stumbles and because of the weight of his head can’t get up.

“Immerse that particular sucker in water!” Oberlin screams. “I desire you to make that costume inoperable.”

So every time the guy gets up we blast him in the legs and he goes down in the mud again. The costume’s coming apart. When it comes all the way apart we see that Death Eating Chips is a girl. In deference to Austerity’s policy of eschewing anything even vaguely degrading to women she’s shaved off her hair and plucked her eyebrows and is wearing a chest-flattening harness. Still, her beauty shines through.

We stop blasting her.

“Think!” she shouts. “Extrapolate your daily actions one-million-fold. Ask yourself if the things you do make sense. Then walk out of that Babylon and join us.”

“Oh, shut up,” Oberlin shouts. “Honestly.”

She picks up what’s left of her enormous head, then flips us off and rejoins her cowering wet friends in the grove. Singing “We Shall Overcome,” they march back to their camp carrying lit homemade candles.

Gerard rolls up the hose and passes out our bonus cocaine.

“Heads out of butts, everybody,” Oberlin says. “Fun’s over. Unless I’m mistaken we still have valued Clients to transport back to a time of quaint enchantment.”

So we toot up while jogging towards the Corkboard of Assignments, and when we get there everyone laughs at me and pelts me with their empty vials because according to the Corkboard my next Table Boy gig is a SafeOrgy.

Nobody likes a SafeOrgy. A SafeOrgy fills you with longing and repulses you at the same time. We supply a sexy room modeled after a posh nineteen-fifties hotel. We offer BodyCons, since even the rich aren’t above the sexually transmitted disease epidemic. They like to let it all hang out and express themselves without any worries, like in the old days. Today I walk in with my tray and seven shrink-wrapped Clients are rolling around on a heart-shaped bed with crooner music playing. We’re not supposed to linger, just set the cold cuts down and get the hell out. But unfortunately a gorgeous overenthusiastic Client ruptures her seal. Our Employee Handbook requires us to perform a quick decon on the spot. There’s a tank of soap mounted above the fireplace. She’s all worked up however and starts groping me. I try to resist but she’s strong. Nothing much really happens. She gets my earlobe in her mouth and starts sucking. That’s about it. It’s not unpleasant but I’m too scared to enjoy it. Finally I get her off me and manage to spray her from head to toe with soap. That cools her down. Maybe too much. As soon as she becomes aware that her boob is protruding from the shrink-wrap her cultural encoding gets the best of her and she starts looking down her nose at me.

“You reprobate Flawed animal!” she says, backpedaling and folding her arms over her chest. “This is going directly into the written summary portion of your Evaluation!”

Luckily the other members of her party are too soused to catch what she’s saying so I manage to get out without being lynched. I immediately go over to Administration to explain it all to Oberlin and Albert. This could be real trouble. They could claim I molested a paying Client. They could demote me even further, to Gravedigger or Septic Tank Tech.

But to my surprise Albert tousles my hair and gives me a cube of fried meat, a true facility rarity. The last time I had meat was four years ago, when a drunken Client singled me out for my subservient attitude. Talk about a feast. Talk about being blocked up for weeks afterwards.