Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

Ida wouldn’t have minded watching, without the table blocking their doings, but just in a casual way. Not sexual, exactly. Almost as you’d watch a short documentary at the museum. With others, on a bench, in a cool, dark room.

“I wish there was a more obvious way to make money off of that idea,” Maury said. “That the earth is simply compacted corpse material. A kind of condensed, spherical dead body.”

“Money!” shouted Bummer, and then a few of them repeated the word in different foreign accents, until they’d reduced it to a pirate’s growl. Ida wasn’t sure just how ironic they were being, and they probably weren’t either.

“Actually,” said Mort, and this set off a chorus of groans around the table.

“What? I was just going to say that that’s the plot of a science fiction novel. Really. I’m not kidding.”

“We know that, Mort,” said Harriet. “That’s what’s so depressing. That you are reminded of a book and now we have to hear about it.”

Cerise suggested that it wouldn’t hurt to hear the plot. That Mort deserved a chance.

Foster said that it might hurt. It had hurt before. “In the Middle Ages they described the plots of books to people as a form of torture.”

“Okay. Okay,” said Mort. “I’ll be fast and you will thank me. So the earth keeps swelling in circumference as people die and rot, adding to the mass of the planet. Right? Then it gets too big for its orbit and things go, uh, pretty wrong. I mean. There’s a company, called The Company, I’m not even kidding, that has to keep people from dying. They have this old, wet—”

“Shut up already,” said Harriet. “I didn’t come to a reading. Jesus.”

An obituary had justbeen written for their industry. And not just their industry—Thompson was a think tank that had turned into a make tank, which meant it was essentially just like any other company—but industry itself. Selling was old-school. Selling was done. The world may as well have worn black. The experts all signed off on it. The only thing left to fight about was the timing. Dead tomorrow, dead in a fortnight, dead before the solstice. A kind of rubbernecker’s thrill had resulted, even if Ida would be watching her own spectacular crash. They’d all be out of jobs. The whole idea of a job would be washed from memory. People would wander in the snow, which they couldn’t recall the name for, bleeding. Customers would no longer pay for anything. Customers had more power than ever. The word “customer” was, in fact, offensive. It was probably racist. You had to court these people personally, go to their houses and lather them in cream, rub their backs. That’s what they were all talking about now. What this would look like. Who would scrub in and chase the danger.

“Who volunteers?” asked Maury, cracking his knuckles.

No one spoke.

“I gave my last massage in ninth grade,” said Cerise. “Hit my quota early. I am pretty much done touching others. In that way.”

“We are too obsessed with people,” said Harriet.

Royce laughed. “Because they are the ones with the money?”

“And too obsessed with money. We are so obsessed with new products, new go-to-market strategies. What we need is to reinvent the customer. That’s where the next major disruption will take place.”

“The customer is always in flight,” mumbled Aniel.

“Oh dear god,” Royce said to Harriet. “Really? I truly hope that you are not getting paid for the things you say and do. I hope you are a secret intern, sent here to test us, to see how we respond to fatuous drool. Please, please tell me that you make no money for your ideas.”

“Okay, Royce, if that’s what you want to hear. I make no money for my ideas. But I’m only saying that to comfort you. You seem afraid and I don’t want to scare you. Anyway, it’s sort of true. Weirdly, since you are hardly ever right. ‘Money,’ per se, would be the wrong word—not nearly strong or frightening enough, too bound up in specific meaning—for what they heap on me in return for my services. I used to make money. A filthy amount of it, and I stashed it in a sock the size of your whole house. But then, well, ‘raise’ isn’t the word for what happened. There is no word for the kind of promotion I received. And now I’ve left any category you could even remotely comprehend. I’d have to physically carve a new gutter in your brain for you to understand any of this. With a surgical knife that would blind you to look at. But I still enjoy being your friend. I’m not so advanced that I can’t recognize what good people you are. Here’s to good people, who remind us of our origins.”

Harriet raised a glass, but the toast had few takers.

“That was funny at first, but then it got really long and tedious,” said Royce, who was using Donny as a pillow.

“Whereas I feel that it started out tedious and then grew sickening,” said Ida. “And we still don’t actually know what she gets paid.”

Harriet smirked, rubbing her fingers together to suggest currency.

“Speaking of people,” said Aniel. “There are a few of them I’d like to lick. Not at this table, though. No offense.”

It was getting late, and everyone started to look around at what, and who, there was to be had in the room. Or denied. It was that time of night, but maybe it was always that time of night. There was a collective obligation to try to find moisture, but they were often slow to suit up, sluggish to the starting line. They got tired. They felt slightly sick. Sometimes hooking up took so much work. In the end maybe they preferred to be alone. And yet even that didn’t scratch at the distant craving, not really.

Ida went homewith Mort that night. She’d survived his mild trespasses a few times, and the embarrassment she’d initially expected over sex with a young, hairless engineer never really ignited. Maybe that counted for something. Sometimes, at the end of drinking sessions like tonight, each ashamed and regretful to an equal degree, Ida guessed—since they didn’t really stoop to disclosure—they stumbled into each other’s territory, Little Rascals style, providing a certain service. One day, supposedly, a Kind Friend could give them what they needed, and clean up after, and possibly even flush the shame from their systems as well. But for the time being they still had to endure the company of other fleshy need machines, human spouters and little bags of weepery. Mort was younger, and softer all around, but Ida didn’t mind consorting with him because he was erotically polite and nonthreatening and he devoted most of his fornicational energies confirming that everything was all right, as if each new timid push into her, his face ballooning above her like a parade float, might have suddenly changed the ethical terms of their encounter. Which, Ida thought, who knows, maybe it did?

Was it okay, was she okay, did this feel all right, did she mind, was it uncomfortable, did that feel nice? Would she like something else, something different, maybe even a person different from him, which he could possibly try to arrange? Ida pictured Mort on the street, half-naked with his sweet baby legs, soliciting civilians to come up to her apartment and make really, really nice. Mort would do that for her, even if it was secretly for him, to gratify some bottomless need to be solicitous and helpful. The desire to please and please and please. It was all a bit selfish, when you thought about it.

Was it okay, was she okay, did this feel all right? These were the questions a person deserved, Ida thought, but for some reason she only ever heard them naked, and even then not so often. Mort was a good egg, but that was just it. He was no more than that. Smooth and fragile and easy to take for granted.