Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

It was during this staying-away period, when I was sorting through my impressions, that a letter arrived in the mail from the offices of The Next Thing. I was spending so much time trying to make sense of what I’d seen that I had entirely forgotten about the form. The truth is that I hadn’t forgotten it, not entirely. It was still there, waiting for me, right next to other things in my mind, but I was doing my best not to pay attention to it, I was looking off to one side. A copy of the form was there in the envelope, along with a letter from an assistant manager. The letter stated that after studying my work experience, my salary, and my life wishes, the management was prepared to offer me a job similar to mine, in the Information Division, at a considerably higher salary. There was an on-the-job training program, in which I would learn how to gather information about hourly rates of sales in the housewares department and feed it into a database. Promotion to a higher level, at higher pay, with higher benefits, was open to me after two years of service.

The letter made the same impression on me that my second visit did. It interested me, it did more than interest me, it stirred me up, but at the same time it made me wary. The truth of the matter was, I wasn’t all that happy with my job at Sloane & Wilson, where the hours were long, the rules of promotion blurry, and the future unclear. Over the last six months the company had been laying people off left and right. So it isn’t hard to see why the letter produced an uneasiness in me. It was like having someone whisper something in your ear. It made me want to pull away — it made me want to wait. And it wasn’t as if the letter was the only thing I had on my mind, at the time, since this was the period when we first began to hear about the house sales.

Houses in our town, we heard, were being sold to The Next Thing. They in turn sold them to their higher employees: product marketing managers, merchandising supervisors, purchasing trend analysts, customer taste engineers, package design coordinators, consumer desire directors, people like that. Now, there was nothing surprising about this, in itself. The housing market was in good shape, homes were being bought and sold all the time, it made sense that people who worked in our town should live in our town. Still, there it was, a fact to think about, a piece of information to turn over in our minds. The first thing we learned was that the people who were selling their homes had all recently been hired by The Next Thing. They had taken mid-level jobs as information gatherers, customer behavior profilers, product display developers, and shopper satisfaction regulators, as well as low-skill jobs as floor clerks, shelf loaders, aisle cleaners, counter helpers, screen watchers, and security facilitators.

The second thing we learned was that the people who sold their houses were moving into homes down below, which were being leased to them at very reasonable rates. It made sense, if you thought about it — the new workers were now much closer to their jobs in the Under. No longer did they have to drive to the upper parking lot, walk past the cubicles, and take a long escalator ride down to the shelves. Instead they could always stay on the same level as their work. Even so, we couldn’t help wondering, those of us who lived above, how you could give up a home in town to live under the ground. When we tried to imagine it, we saw darkness down there, darkness and gloom. Then we heard — but this was still in the rumor phase — that the homes down there had certain advantages over the ones above. The new houses, it was said, had state-of-the-art kitchens with smooth-top ranges and granite-topped islands and hands-free electronic faucets, finished cellars, big-screen entertainment centers, hardwood decks with cedar furniture. As part of the lease arrangement, the landlord maintained the specially developed lawns, took care of the plumbing, repaired light fixtures and electric baseboards. Down there, the temperature was always mild, rain never fell, and no ice would ever cover your front walk. There was even some talk of benefits to your health, since you wouldn’t have to worry about things like basal-cell skin cancer from overexposure to sunlight. All the same, we had trouble imagining a life lived like that, out of the sun, though we heard that the lighting was exceptionally good, and of course you were free to come up into the sunny world on your lunch break, or after work, or on your vacation.

When I look back on it now, it’s difficult not to think there must have been a moment when things were at a point of balance, when they could have gone either way, so that if we had been more perceptive, more alert to what was happening, we might have kept things from going too far. Many of us believe this, and some even say it aloud, from time to time, in the company of trusted friends. I myself once thought the same thing. But now, when I think about it at all, it seems to me that there never was that decisive moment, which we somehow overlooked, but rather that things were set from the very beginning, and nothing we might have done, nothing at all, would have mattered, in the long run.

It’s hard to remember exactly what took place when, but I’m fairly certain the next thing we heard about was the Discovery. It wasn’t called that at first. At the time, it was just another thing people were talking about, in the streets and restaurants and bedrooms of our town. Three teenagers had wandered around the back of The Next Thing, where there were piles of wooden pallets and a coming and going of delivery trucks. The boys were chased away by a guard, but not before they saw large crates the size of refrigerators descending slowly into the ground. That in itself was nothing special. We knew the goods had to get down to the shelves one way or another. It became worth speculating about when a second elevator was spotted behind an old warehouse, at the far end of town. In the course of the next few weeks a third and fourth elevator were discovered, one behind an abandoned mill on a different side of town, the other in a clearing in the north woods. One thing that struck us was the great distance apart of these delivery elevators. Could there be others? We imagined a system of underground tunnels, along which the goods were transported. Or maybe, some of us thought, the elevators led directly to unloading stations in the town below.

Whatever it was, people in our town began to grow uneasy. Who owned the land below us? we wanted to know. Was The Next Thing buying up the ground right under our feet? We held town meetings, where tempers flared. Some people claimed that if you owned a quarter-acre lot, you owned the quarter acre of land under your land, all the way down, as far as you could go. One skeptic asked whether that meant you owned the earth all the way down to its molten core and up the other side. It was decided at last that the land below the town, starting at a depth of eighteen feet, belonged to the town and could be sold or leased. Large portions had already been leased to The Next Thing, and the revenues had benefited our town in every way. It was true that three members of the Board of Selectmen were already employed as consultants by The Next Thing, and this caused more meetings. At a referendum, citizens turned out in great numbers to vote in favor of continuing the lease, which was said to serve the interests of both parties.

Meanwhile houses all over town were being sold to The Next Thing, who continued to sell them to upper-echelon employees. The new owners maintained the grounds and exteriors but gradually transformed the houses into places of business, with offices where the living rooms used to be. Now it became possible to speak to a representative in your own neighborhood, instead of driving across town to the cubicles. A further advantage was that any item purchased at the Under could conveniently be returned to any of the new offices, just a few blocks away.