Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

Then bless you, my dear young scholars, and be mindful, as you set forth on this memorable day. For on this day I have revealed to you the secret of our people. On this day I have shown you the meaning of death. For before the beginning was , the First Book is . That is the sum of all wisdom. That is all you need to know. My dear ones, my delightful ones, tomorrow is a new day. Tomorrow you will begin your long journey through the Commentaries. It is a journey that will last seven years. Some of you will fall by the wayside. The rest of you will persevere. At times you will grow tired. Your minds will grow perplexed. All life, all death, will seem to you a great riddle, which you can never solve. A darkness will come over your spirit. You will search for a way out, and there will be no way out. But in that hopeless place, in that blackness without light, remember what I have told you here today. Remember the secret of our people. Remember the Paradise of Books. And when you rise from the study-room, bowed down with weariness, then I say unto you, my dear ones: Lift your eyes to the heaven-shelves on every wall, lift your eyes to the living and breathing words that surround you, to the books that soar over you, lift your eyes in rapture, and know who you are: for behold, they are the Ancestors, row on row.

The new structure rose on the outskirts of town, in the field next to the mall. It isn’t true, as some have said, that we knew nothing about it at the time and were later taken by surprise. How could that have been possible? It was right there, next to the mall, a big operation only partly concealed by a high fence, with trucks going in and out every day, to say nothing of the ads in the local paper, telling us to get ready for the big event. I even seem to recall a sign somewhere in the area of the dig, with diagrams and pictures, though I can’t swear to it now. So it just isn’t true, as some say, that it took us by surprise, as if we were innocent, that it sprang out of nowhere, like a miracle. What they mean, in my opinion, is that we didn’t really care all that much about it, at the time. The fact is, we knew places like that, we’d been going to them for years. Why should we care about another? And then there was the name itself: The Next Thing. That was a name that irritated a lot of us, made us skeptical and even resentful. It was the sort of name that seemed to smile at you and say, “I know you can’t resist me,” all with a sly wink. So I suppose it isn’t entirely true that we didn’t care about it, since our not caring was mixed with an irritation, a resistance to being treated a certain way. But I think it’s accurate to say that many of us were in no hurry to go out there, once the doors finally opened.

Of course, those of us who stayed away were bound to hear things, there was no getting around that. It wasn’t as if we were making it our business not to know anything, the way we might if we really hated it. What was there to hate? It was just another one of those places on the outskirts of town, with its opening-day hoopla and its vague promise of a better life. We hardly listened to the talk, though it’s only fair to say that a few things did stand out as peculiar. When you entered the doors, people said, you found yourself in what looked like an immense office, with many cubicles, each with a person inside, and aisles going off in all directions. Another thing we heard was that the place itself was down below, in the basement. It struck us as an odd way to arrange things, the cubicles on the main floor, the shelves below, and that’s mostly what we thought about, when we thought about it at all, in the days before we actually drove out for a look.

And we did go out there, as we’d always known we would, partly to see for ourselves, and partly I suppose to prove to ourselves that we weren’t staying away in order to make some kind of point. A few did just that, of course; they had their reasons, the same reasons they always had; but for the rest of us, the ones who hadn’t yet seen the place, it wasn’t like that. We weren’t in a hurry, that was all. What we found was the usual parking lot, the usual long flat stretched-out building with jutting wings and many glass doors. The first thing that struck us was the cubicles. I for one had imagined them very differently. They weren’t formal and over-orderly, as I had pictured them, but casual and almost festive, grouped in sections with wide aisles leading to down escalators. Each cubicle had three colorful glass panels and an open side, so that you could see into them and over the tops. What surprised me was the insides, which looked very comfortable and inviting — some had a few armchairs or small couches, some had a table and chairs, but all had little homey touches that caught your eye, like a table lamp with a fringed shade, or children’s drawings, or a bowl of tangerines. So as you walked past the cubicles, you had a desire to enter, to look around. Here and there you could see a couple, leaning forward intently as a man or woman spoke to them. Even on that first visit, as I walked toward an escalator, I remember thinking that I ought to take a moment to step into one of the cubicles, see what they were all about.

The escalators went down, way down, crossing other escalators going up. During that long ride, you had the sense of shelves rising up all around you, higher and higher, until they were lost in the lights. If you held your eyes a certain way, you could make it seem that the shelves were moving and you were standing still. This was in the very early days of The Next Thing, but already the basement had a nickname: the Under. People would say, “Have you been to the Under?” instead of “Have you been to The Next Thing?” So as I rode down, that first time, I thought: Now I’m seeing it, the Under. At the bottom, there was a feeling that you were standing on the floor of the ocean, trying to see up to the sky. The ceiling itself, I later learned, was one hundred and eighty feet high. You could tell that the architects had done what they could to counter the depressing effect of all that height — the aisles were wide, almost like streets, and here and there the management had set up Relaxation Corners, open spaces with couches and armchairs, where people sat reading newspapers or drinking mocha and hazelnut coffee from machines. Some of the crowd couldn’t help staring up, like small-town kids in the big city. I stared too — it didn’t bother me what anyone might think. The place seemed to have everything you might ever want, but a lot more of everything than you’d find anywhere else. I liked watching the big loading platforms that moved up and down the shelves from floor to ceiling, at intervals of maybe twenty or thirty feet. They looked like freight elevators open on all sides. There were also railed walkways, high overhead, that ran parallel to the shelves. Way up there, almost out of sight, clerks in yellow uniforms were unloading goods onto the platforms. Down below, youthful clerks in tan shirts and dark green ties walked through the aisles, trying to catch your eye, trying to see what they could do for you.

But I wasn’t there to have anything done for me. I was there to — well, it would have been hard to say. I suppose I was there to look around. One thing you couldn’t help noticing was the shopping carts. They were wider and deeper than the usual kind, painted bright red, with special flaps that folded out in front if you needed more room. Even better were the double-decker carts, high rumbly things that came up to your chest. You had the feeling that the people who ran the place had thought it all out, the big picture and the small. I think I was wondering what else they had to show for themselves, down here at the bottom of the ocean.