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

A car was waiting for her when she got out of the plane. It was an old Humpmaster, one of the costliest models of its year, now scrupulously maintained in accordance with the modern-day object and purpose of Glatt’s Gorge. Standing beside it, grinning happily, was a young man. “Miss Tagbord? It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m ‘Dirk Biceps.’” He smiled. “Not really, of course. My real name is Claude Bawlz. But as far as you’re concerned I’m Dirk Biceps. The pet food magnate.”

Dragnie extended her hand and grasped his in a firm, clean handshake of hands. “The pleasure is mine, ‘Dirk.’”

“They’re waiting for you in town. Shall we go?”

He put Dragnie’s suitcase in the car’s trunk and they set off down the unpaved mountain road. Dragnie gazed at the foothills to either side, and at the undisturbed meadow over which the road ran, and decided that none of this had changed in ten years, exactly as she knew it would and, more importantly, wouldn’t.

“How long have you been here, ‘Dirk’?” she asked the driver in order to obtain information.

“About six months,” he said with casual accuracy. “Mr. Glatt came and visited me in my office in February, and by mid-April I had shut down the factory, dissolved the corporation, dynamited the warehouse, murdered my wife and children, cancelled my subscriptions to Dog Food Age and Modern Gerbil, and ended up here.”

She knew he was talking about the actual history of the real Dirk Biceps, and responded in kind. “Was it a good decision?”

He took his eyes off the road for one moment and directed them to look at Dragnie’s, which they did with the certitude of human visual organs obeying their owner. “The best you’ll ever make,” he said.

It was exactly what she expected him to say and hearing it filled her with triumph. This was a place founded on an idea; and, as ideas never change provided they are shielded from the world, Glatt’s Gorge had not changed, and never would.

She saw familiar landmarks that she remembered from her week’s stay a decade earlier, when the real Dirk Biceps, the real John Glatt, and all the other tycoons, entrepreneurs, and industrialists, plus a philosopher and a composer and a beautiful movie star, had removed themselves from the outside world and repaired here, to mount their strike against society. Nestled in a knoll against the hillside was Douglas Sinew’s Fabric, Trim, and Notions-o-Rama, its sign, with Sinew’s trademark emblem of a smiling abacus, testimony to Sinew’s previous profession as an actuary. He had, during his time at Glatt’s Gorge, discovered an entirely new method of being an actuary, one that sped up actuarial calculations tenfold, provided three times the predictive accuracy, and at a cost of mere pennies a day. Like everyone else at the Gorge, however, he refused to take it into the outside world, either to exploit it commercially or to present it to his fellow professionals.

Across the field stood Kent Wallbricker’s distillery, the source of what was considered by experts to be the best pine cone liqueur in five counties, an achievement made all the more impressive considering Wallbricker’s job back in the corrupt world, where he had been a professional tap dancer and performed on television network variety shows for the entertainment of cowards, weaklings, and other members of the cannibal class. During his time at the Gorge he had invented a revolutionary new method of tap dancing, one that enabled him to tap five times as fast, with double the time accuracy and one-tenth the fatigue. He, too, refused to share it with the world. Kent Wallbricker’s “dynamic tap technique” died with him two years earlier.

“’Mr. Fasnacht’ is waiting for you at the hotel,” Dragnie’s driver said.

She nodded, her attention fixed on the town as they pulled in, past the civic sculpture of a solid gold dollar sign and exclamation point that greeted visitors. The road here was unpaved, too, but nonetheless lined with shops and services: a bakery, a hardware store (“We Hand-Forge Our Own Nails” read the sign in the window), a post office, an ice cream parlor, a bowling alley, a slaughterhouse, an automobile dealership, a grocery store, a fire station, a bridal shop, a Major League baseball stadium, a museum of contemporary art, a maximum-security prison, a hospital for the criminally insane, and a dinner theater. Everywhere she looked, Dragnie saw men and women walking with unyielding purpose, confident in the use of their own legs and feet. Their feet seemed not to touch the ground as they moved busily about on the errands of the lives they lived during their existence. Then Dragnie noticed that, in fact, their feet didn’t touch the ground. These, she thought, must be the anti-gravity shoes John told her he had devised for residents of the Gorge, one of the inventions, along with the refracting lens that concealed the valley, the motor that converted atmospheric static electricity into kinetic energy, the reverse-osmotic pump that transformed ordinary poison ivy into 60/40 cotton-poly sport shirts, the amplification mirror that harnessed starlight to boil water, and the other brilliant achievements that made living in Glatt’s Gorge different from living in a poorly-equipped summer camp.

Her eye was arrested by a small cluster of men and women following a single individual, who commanded their attention by holding up a furled umbrella. The group had just emerged from Hercules Fleet’s Pizza ‘n’ Calzone. The sign in the window depicted a stylized view of Moses descending Mt. Sinai, holding the twin tablets traditionally inscribed with the Ten Commandments but here displaying, on the one, an image of a pizza, and on the other, a calzone—graphic acknowledgment and commemoration of Fleet’s achievements in the outer world, where he had been a top Conservative rabbi. While at Glatt’s Gorge he had invented a revolutionary new way to be a Conservative rabbi, a way that resulted in his being twice as conservative and three times as rabbinical at half the cost. But he had refused share the secret with the rest of the world, and declined even to discuss it while turning out the best pizza in the valley.

“If you don’t mind, ‘Dirk,’ I’d like to tag along with that tour for a bit and see what things are like here now,” Dragnie said.

Her driver nodded. “Just check in at the Inn when you’re ready,” he said, and drove off.

Dragnie hurried along and fell in step with the tour group. Over the next hour they visited a number of exhibits, at each of which, she noticed, every care had been taken to maintain the original appearance and function of the facility, while the actors portraying the various figures who had, ten years earlier, “gone Glatt,” were scrupulous in their costumes, accents, and values.

They stopped by the Post Office, where the young actor portraying Flint Bigbone, the former natural gas magnate, demonstrated stamp-cancellation techniques on fragile parcels, while lecturing them on the evils of subsidized medical care. Next came the Bakery, run by a talented blonde playing former Globe-Tech C.E.O. Donna-May Uppercut, who showed everyone how to hand-twist their own pretzels. And they visited the hardware store, where a vaguely familiar character actor embodying Gil “Dad” Popp handed out period paint chips while regaling them with the story of how, the day before his arrival at Glatt’s Gorge, he had personally detonated 1,225 pounds of high explosives to demolish his entire magnesium processing plant.

By then it was snack time. Dragnie took her leave of the group, consulted the site map with its dollar-sign compass rose, and found her way to the Glatt’s Gorge Inn and Conference Center.

Inside, the lobby was bustling, as corporate parties or select private individuals checked in, checked out, or met for the evening’s activities. Dragnie’s driver said, “I’ll get your key. Don’t bother looking for an elevator. There isn’t one.” He pointed to a row of three arches standing off to the side of the main desk. “Just walk through one of those. It will read the key and instantly teleport you to your door. It’s something Mr. Glatt invented while ironing a shirt one day. We’re hoping to develop its use to transport the barrels of oil Flint Buttslammer figured out how to refine from spider webs. The idea… but look at me, telling you all this, when you probably know more than I do…”