Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

People were listening to Katherine again now, but she did not notice. “I despise it here,” she went on to Mrs. Lenaghan. “You know what I saw the first day I got to Los Angeles, when Paul was driving me back from the airport, the first afternoon I was here? We were driving back from the airport, and we passed a doughnut stand, and on top of it was this huge cement doughnut about twenty feet high, revolting around. I mean revolving. You know. It was going around and around.” Katherine waved her arm in demonstration. “That was the first thing I saw, before I saw the stand. From a long, long way off, that big empty hole going around and around up in the air, with some name painted on it. Well I thought, that’s what this city is! That’s what it is, a great big advertisement for nothing.”

Katherine stopped speaking, or rather shouting. Silence fell over the Skinners’ party, every member of which had been listening to her.

5

IT WAS THE DAY BEFORE Thanksgiving, but in Mar Vista the perpetual summer continued. Babies rode barefoot in their strollers, front lawns were wet and green under the rotating sprinklers, or scorched brown by the heat, depending on the attentions of their owners, for water is expensive in Los Angeles. Only the angle of the sun through the palms, and the early dark, suggested that the winter equinox was approaching.

Paul still sat at his desk behind a growing heap of books and papers. He had finished the first section of his work on N.R.D.C., a brief historical description of Mar Vista from prehistoric times to the establishment of the Nutting plant in 1940. He had thrown in enough dinosaurs and conquistadores to keep the interest of the lay reader, while presenting sequentially the basic geographic and historical facts. Still, he was impatient to get on to the real subject. He tapped his foot on the synthetic floor, and his pencil on the desk top. Only now his impatience was more general; he just wanted to get through the next half-hour. Nutting was letting everyone off at three for the holiday, and he had an appointment.

He was going to have a cup of coffee with Ceci O’Connor. That was how he put it to himself; it sounded better than to say that he had an assignation with a waitress. Anyhow, she was not really a waitress: he was convinced of that. And it was not an assignation: they were going to have a cup of coffee, and talk about books, because there was no chance to talk at the Aloha Coffee Shop.

“Hey, Cattleman!” Fred Skinner put his chimpanzee’s face round the frosted-glass partition. “Wait till you hear this. All our problems are solved.” He sat on the corner of Paul’s desk, knocking over a pile of books. “Hell. Sorry. Look at this.” He spread out a glossy brochure.

UnDat

it read in multicolor, three-dimensional letters on a gold background.

The Universal Data Processor

Below, in the center of a gold aureole, was portrayed a streamlined green and silver machine, roughly the shape, and about twice the size (to judge by the pretty girl who stood with her arm about it, smiling erotically), of a large wringer washer.

“We’ve got it made,” Skinner said. “No more incinerators, no more sifting ashes, no watching the janitors all afternoon.”

“You mean this machine is going to get rid of the classified trash for you?” Paul asked.

“For us, pal. You’ve got to start identifying with the corporate image. Our problems are your problems, Cattleman.”

“Yeah. How’s it going to do that?”

“Well, like it says here.” Fred unfolded the brochure. “‘Materials placed in the hopper are first treated with a unique bleaching and dissolving agent which removes all traces of text, whether written—’ Wait a moment. ‘Five distinct tearing and shredding arms then rapidly reduce the—’ Here we are. ‘The UnDat is capable of completely processing all forms of paper, cardboard, and celluloid in a matter of minutes. For maximum efficiency of operation, large metal fasteners and rings should be removed before insertion.’ Great, isn’t it?”

“So you put all your, I mean we put all our classified trash into this machine; and what comes out?”

“It’s a kind of green sludge. Looks like damp shredded wheat, sort of. I had a sample of it, but I had to leave it with Howard Leon. He’s investigating the possibility that Bob Kinsman might be able to use some of it to pack components over in the plant.”

“We’re really going to get one of these things?”

“It looks pretty definite,” Skinner said with satisfaction.

“Goddamn.” Paul laughed. “Crazy.”

“What’s so crazy about it? Listen, most of the big companies on government contract have already put in something like this—Sylvania, Ramo-Woolbridge—everybody.” Paul continued laughing. “Whoever thought this up had real genius. It fills a fucking felt need. I only wish I was going to collect one percent of the net.”

“Is it expensive?”

“In the neighborhood of nine or ten K.” Fred took out a new pack of cigarettes, and broke the cellophane with his thumbnail. “And of course it costs another K or so a year to operate.”

“But you won’t be saving any money then,” Paul objected.

“Hell, no. Why should we save money?” Fred said, tapping his cigarette on the desk. “Butt?”

“No thanks. Well, hell, I suppose so as to apply it somewhere else, to buy something you need, or save the government some money, or raise our salaries—I mean, you read about how these automated machines are going to do all that.”

“Boy, have you got the wrong idea,” Fred said from between his hands as he crouched over the flame, for even in the windless air-conditioned climate of Nutting he behaved as if he were trying to light up on some stormy beach-head. “You’re all confused, boy,” he said. “You can’t apply your small-time civilian standards to this kind of operation. You’re talking as if N.R.D.C. was your family budget, a few dollars saved on rent, a few dollars more to blow on whisky. It just doesn’t work that way here. You don’t have to get all shook up about a little matter of nine K. There’s plenty more where that comes from.

“Think what we’re buying with it,” he went on. “Absolute security. Say, that’s a good line: I can work that in. Another thing you’ve got to keep in mind. The bigger the yearly cost figures for the department, the bigger the yearly increment. I know it takes some getting used to after you’ve been up in that scruffy ivory tower. You don’t have to tell me. Don’t tell me, just ask me.” Fred grinned, and drew on his cigarette. “Any time.”

“Thanks, Chief,” Paul said. “Thanks for that generous offer.” He wished Skinner would go away, though, so that he could clean up his desk and be ready to leave at three.

“You’ve got to learn to ride with it,” Fred went on. “Listen, when I was first here, soon as I began to see what the score was, I started requisitioning supplies. I put in for every fucking thing I could think of, every kind of paper and pencil and notebooks; even some furniture, a chair and a couple of lamps, everything. I was testing, you know. Testing. I couldn’t believe it. Well, it all came through. Not a bitch from anywhere. Jesus, when I think what us poor instructors used to go through trying to get a couple of red pencils out of Miss Rollins’s supply cupboard.” He sucked in, then blew out smoke.

“What do you know?” Paul looked at Skinner’s cigarette. Presumably Skinner would not leave until it was finished, and he always smoked them to a minimal stub. “Guess I’ll send in for some stuff tomorrow,” he said. He looked at the UnDat brochure again, comparing the model hugging the machine (unfavorably) to Cecile O’Connor. They were both dark blondes, though; not dissimilar in shape.