Ellis Weiner - Atlas Slugged AGAIN - The Secret Sequel to the Towering Masterpiece

The bum shrugged. “Bottle deposits, petty crime, and restaurant refuse.”

“That’s terrible!” Banden cried.

“I get by,” the bum said.

Later, lying together in Dragnie’s executive car on a full-sized bed made expressly for rail travel by a top bed maker, Banden grew reflective. “When I said ‘that’s terrible’ to that man, I was serious.”

“I know it,” Dragnie replied.

“How, in this day and age, can there still be such a thing as bottle deposits?”

Dragnie smiled in amused amusement. She turned toward him, the dim light playing fleetingly over his strong, youthful body and her admittedly twenty-five-years older but no less toned, attractive torso. “We’re working on it,” she murmured, and reached for him, and he reached for her, and after several forays into the realm of highest desire, in which her body was able to communicate to her her own deepest values even while his exertions vouchsafed promises of physical consciousness that were not kept, they voluntarily submitted themselves to a self-extinguishing of consciousness and the thorough obliteration of their awareness and love of existence, and slept.

The appearances in Chicago went well, as Dragnie gathered data on the public’s widespread endorsement of the Strike. The next morning the Tagbord Special set off north, to Milwaukee, and from there northwest, toward Minneapolis. En route, gazing from the clear bubble dome of the observation car, Dragnie and Banden beheld a tableau of American freedom, as motorists stranded for lack of money for gas, and farmers on stubble-strewn fields following behind plows drawn by patient, aged horses, and shopkeepers undisturbed by deliveries of goods or by customers to demand them, all glanced up as the train hurtled by, and raised their hands in triumphant celebration of their shared national resolve. This, Dragnie thought, is proof of what men are capable of.

It took three days, traveling northwest, to reach Spokane, Washington. En route the Special made sporadic stops in small villages and hamlets, where occasionally a welcoming committee met it at the station, and men in their one decent suit offered handfuls of cash if only they could board the silver train and ride it to any destination that wasn’t the present town, and shy little girls in party dresses were pushed forward by their noble, clear-eyed mothers to hand to Dragnie a plate of cookies or a jar of lemonade, along with a note asking for one thing or another—a job; money; or simply that Dragnie adopt the child and raise her as her own daughter. In each instance the gift was received gratefully and its receipt logged by Nathan A. Banden, except for the offered children, which were politely declined. When Banden asked the assembled well-wishers how they felt about the Strike, no one, other than rotters or bums, replied with anything but praise. “Well, sir, I don’t rightly know much about inter-whatchamacallit politics,” mused a former grain dealer, squinting into the distance and divulging meaning from his consciousness. “But the way I figure it, anything that gets the rest of the world to buy our yams, that’s what I’m for.”

On the third week of their tour, word came via telegraph that John Glatt and the Strike Committee had succeeded in establishing its most visionary law to date: the privatization of everything once managed by the Federal government. The armed forces had years before been replaced by private security contractors, but the new law, dubbed The Mind Your Own Business Act, continued in that rational, efficient tradition. Environmental protection, highway maintenance, air traffic control, the minting of currency: all sloughed off their old, diseased governmental skin and were born anew under private, for-profit exploitation. “Let the word go forth,” John Glatt announced. “From this day forward, the United States is a gated community. Visitors must announce themselves at the guard station, and trespassers will be prosecuted.”

The consequences of these new policies were quickly forthcoming. In a small town in Italy, a cobbler whose lifelong dream had been to emigrate to the U.S. decided to remain in his home town and pursue his cobbling there. In a large city in Algeria, a family of four who had saved for years to emigrate to the U.S. concluded that, with no more public amenities, services, entitlement payouts, emergency room medical care, or food stamps available in America, they’d be better off moving to Spain. An Indonesian grocer, disheartened at the news that America was no longer a place where the weak, the mediocre, the lazy, or the incompetent might thrive on the wealth extracted from the industrious and the successful, killed himself.

But a young man in Senegal, either in ignorance of the new laws or in defiance of them, went forward with his plan to move to America. When word of his arrival at JFK reached the citizens of Queens, N.Y., they covertly formed a “Citizens’ Strike Support Committee” and, by cover of night, burned down the airport. All that remained on the smoking site was a note reading, “We’re taking back this land and returning it to its original state.” Within a week of this event, ports, airports, and cross-border highway checkpoints all over the continental U.S. were ravaged by fire, explosives, or the concerted efforts of massed demonstrators. The instigators of these actions became folk heroes overnight. One broadcast on a shortwave radio frequency, “If they don’t get the message when we deny them the America of their dreams, they’ll get it when we deny them a way to enter our shores.” When airport or maritime unions protested these acts, John Glatt and the Strike Committee issued Communique No. 12, which outlawed collective bargaining in all corporations employing more than three persons. This, Dragnie thought, was the apotheosis of the highest American values: The rejection of collective action as being repugnant to the American ideal of self-sufficiency, and the defense of each corporation’s right to deal honestly and straightforwardly with each employee on an individual basis. This, she concluded as the Tagbord Special pulled into Sacramento, was the very essence and enactment of moral significance.

The meeting took place in a squalid, filthy room in the basement of the White Home in the nation’s capital. Formerly used as an office for the social secretary of the Head Person of the Government of the U.S., it had fallen into neglect over the past ten years as that office, once highly admired by men, was seen to be an empty shell devoid of meaning and significance, and important people from industry, agriculture, the arts, and the sciences no longer wished to be seen associating with its occupant. The nauseatingly mint green institutional paint was peeling from its unhappy walls. Several bulbs were missing from its harsh overhead array of disingenuous fluorescent lights, presenting the appearance of a series of dark gray bruises amid the glare. There were no windows. A scent of mold, dead things, and moral exhaustion permeated the air.

Present at the meeting were Mr. Jenkins, the Head Person of the U.S., and his usual coterie of experts and advisers: Philip Sissyburger, the effeminate and complacent Minister of Equality; Dr. Francis Tinklepants, the Chief Diplomat to Foreign Places, who was incapable of offering a direct answer to any question put to him; Professor Davis, the Secretary of Wisdom, who insisted that his conception of reality was superior to all others; and T.T. Mucklicker, who was an authority on what was known as Public Relations. They had assumed their seats along one side of the conference table and now watched as, under conditions of the highest security, four other men arrived: M. Jacques Beaucoup, of The People’s State Of The People Of France; Sir Lord Derek Blimey, of The People’s State Of The People Of Great Britain; Dr. Ivan Lubyanka, of The People’s State Of The People Of Russia; and Signore Giuseppe Tortellini, of The People’s State Of The People Of Italy.