Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“Like it’s shit, man,” he said. “What do you think that place is making over there in Mar Vista? It’s just making death. You got to have some bread, all right, there’s other ways to get it.”

Everyone nodded. Paul felt out of breath, as if he had received a blow under his ribs. He knew what Fred Skinner would have said: that Nutting was not making death, but laboring desperately to stave it off—that only through a relentless effort to produce the means of destruction could we deter the enemy from destroying us. Therefore we must keep on, keep on, etc.

But Paul did not say this; for one thing, he was not sure he believed it. Also, he knew that the argument would irrevocably mark him as an outsider.

“You’ve got it wrong,” he objected lightly. “Nutting’s just a research outfit. The only stuff they’re really producing in quantity, right now anyway, is television components.” Unsympathetic looks greeted this; Paul remembered that in Ceci’s opinion TV was not a low-brow nuisance, but a carnivorous brain-washing monster.

An uneasy sensation had started in his stomach, too—probably it came from eating cream cake at midnight. He felt in his pocket for the envelope of digestive tablets that he sometimes carried.

“You mean you don’t have any government contracts?” Steve said.

“Hell, yes, of course we—they have contracts.” Paul worked one of the tablets out of the envelope. “But you’re over-simplifying.” He swallowed it unobtrusively, with a bitter chaser of tepid expresso. “We’re just working on—well, I can’t tell you what they’re working on, it’s against regulations, but it’s not really military. Anyhow,” (he laughed, trying to get them back on his side) “from what I’ve seen, you don’t have to worry about Nutting developing anything dangerous. They’re spending enough money and time to build a mountain, but all they’ve made out of it lately is some pretty sick-looking mole-hills.” He laughed a bit more; Tony, Jeanne, and John joined him, but Steve did not.

Paul tried to ignore Steve; he went on. “Like I’ll give you an example. This isn’t breaking security—it happened years ago. They got a contract at Nutting to do a job on the repair and servicing of radar stations. You know there’s radar equipment set up all along the coasts to look out for enemy aircraft, and they have to revolve constantly to cover the whole sky. But they had to be checked and oiled from time to time, and sometimes a part would have to be replaced. So the problem Nutting had was, how much would the radar have to be slowed down for a mechanic to repair it without getting too dizzy, and still lose as little sky coverage as possible. They had mathematicians working on the problem, of course, and physicists, and engineers, and communications specialists, and electronics men, and even psychologists. There were all kinds of angles, like, for instance, maybe the equipment could be redesigned a little, or different kinds of repair work could be done at different speeds, and maybe the physical make-up and personality type of the mechanic would be significant. They built a mock-up of a radar station in the plant and had a lot of volunteers revolving on it. Anyhow, so this went on for a whole goddamned year, and at the end of the year they got out a report in several volumes presenting all the data and tables and drawings and formulae they’d worked out, and making a whole lot of very complex recommendations.

“But meanwhile, all this time, another company somewhere else was working on perfecting radar equipment. Naturally. And so, just about the time the N.R.D.C. report was finished, these other guys came up with a new type of radar that didn’t ever need to be oiled or repaired.”

This time even Steve laughed. “Jesus, that must have finished them!” Tony said.

“That’s what I thought too,” Paul agreed. “But it wasn’t true. Nobody gave a damn, apparently; they just filed the report away and started on the next project. I was talking about it to a mathematician who was here from Boston; he has a theory about the whole thing. His idea is, it’s supposed to turn out like that. He calls it Watson’s Law; that’s his name. Watson’s Law says that the purpose of this whole economy is to expend as much time, money, and material as possible without creating anything useful. Otherwise, see, the productive capacity of the country would get out of hand. You notice it most in organizations like Nutting. When they’re working on a government contract, they can’t afford to produce anything that might compete with private enterprise. But the process is going on everywhere.”

“Only not here,” Jeanne put in. “We’re all out of it. I mean, it’s like Steve once said—what was it?—we don’t any of us here hustle for death or deception.” She looked at Steve; he nodded.

“All right,” Paul said. “I mean, no. You can’t opt out of your society like that.” He was facing Steve, not Jeanne. “The same people I work for at the plant, you’re driving them around town in your cab, and John’s painting their houses and your friend Walter’s killing their bugs. If you want to keep your hands really clean, you can’t stay here, you’ve got to go be a hermit in the mountains somewhere. And even then you wouldn’t be clear, you’d be depending on the government to keep the area safe from gangs of bandits and forest fires. And what’d happen if everybody started acting like you?” Paul became aware that he had finally been forced into the position of The Other, but went on, still trying to speak casually. “There’d be terrible unemployment, depression, maybe a war. What’re you going to do about that?”

“Christ, I don’t know,” Steve said. “That’s not my business. You got us into this mess; you get us out.”

Paul glared at Steve, infuriated by his cool tone and his use of the second person singular; he was about to accuse him of being solipsistic and irresponsible. But now John, who had been listening silently, took his guitar out of its case and played two chords; then two more, in a loose blues rhythm, humming under his breath. Someone across the room began beating softly on the table in accompaniment.

Gradually the place grew quieter; some of the people at the tables stopped to listen; some went on talking, but in lower voices. Ceci slid back into her seat beside Paul and took his hand under the table. He clasped hers hard.

As John continued to play, Paul’s anger and the pain in his stomach moderated. He thought that he was right, but that whether or not he was right, he would never convince Steve, who for some reason was permanently down on him—maybe out of loyalty to his pal Walter Wong. Still, you couldn’t expect to please everybody—the rest of Ceci’s friends liked him. He began to feel better, to be ready for the next thing to happen, whatever it might be. Maybe someone would sing now or recite beat poetry.

In fact, a man with a bunch of papers in his hand had just come up to the table, and was speaking to John, when something did happen. The front door was shoved open with a loud crash, and two large policemen entered the coffee house. John broke off in the middle of a phrase. Within thirty seconds everyone in the room had stopped talking.

There was a scuffle in back by the expresso machine. Two more cops appeared through the burlap curtain, pushing ahead of them a customer who had been in the washroom. Paul had noticed before how the Los Angeles police, because of their uniforms (tight gaiters, leather windbreaker, ammunition belt, black leather gloves) resemble stormtroopers or juvenile delinquents more than they do the cops back East. These four were no exception. He was not frightened of them, but he found it necessary to remind himself that he had not done anything illegal lately, had he?