New Taboos (8 page)

Automatically, she helped him stand. He had his orange inmate's suit on.

“Rudy …?”

He stood there swaying, mouth slack. “Faye! Where am I? How did I get here?” He reached out, supported himself with one hand on her shoulder. “Are we escaping?”

“Oh no, Rudy. You didn't do this yourself?”

“No. I … they drugged me, I think. I can't …” He was staring past her, a new alertness coming into his face.

“Faye. Get in the car!”

“What?” She turned to look.

Something reared up, glinting, shuddering, rippling. Its motion didn't seem to fit its size. It was so big. The motion was a little like a whale she'd seen from a boat once. But she knew what it must be.

“The worm,” Rudy said, voice haggard. “Faye—get in the fucking car.”

“You too, Rudy! Let's go!”

“No way. That thing is fast. They took out your tracker so it's after me. I don't want to fucking live here, Faye.” He pushed past her. “And they're not going to let me go.”

“Rudy!”

But he was running toward the worm now. Still doped up, he was like a running drunk, wobbling along, almost falling, stumbling sometimes, but picking up speed.

He looked over a shoulder. “Get in the car!” he shouted. “Go!”

The worm was about forty yards back. Rudy was running across the road now, drawing the worm off to the opposite side.

“Fucking
go!”
he shouted, over his shoulder. “Please!”

She turned and walked mechanically to the front of the car—a wave of fear caught up to her, as if it were coming ahead of the worm to get her, to hold her down for it. She had to struggle to make her fingers work on the door handle. She got the car door open, ducked in, stamped
the brake, put the car in gear and slammed her foot on the accelerator. The door was still open, a warning chime going off, but she kept accelerating, looking in the mirror just once, to see Rudy facing the worm, his arms upraised in unmitigated terror …

The worm slammed down on him like a fly swatter.

She gasped and forced her attention back to driving, and saw she'd wandered over the center line. Another car was rushing toward her. She hit the brakes, twisted the wheel, and her car spun like a carnival ride—then jolted to a stop, the engine dead. Faye sat there hyperventilating, trying to figure out how to get the car going again, her hands trembling.

The car she'd almost hit was backing up. It stopped beside her. “Faye?”

She looked up to see Phil, and two men with him. One of them, in the back seat, was a dark-skinned man wearing a uniform.

For a long moment she thought he was a guard from Statewide and Phil was here to hand her back over to them.

Then she looked closer at the uniform, and saw that it was U.S. Marshals Service.

“So they weren't letting me go,” she said.

Phil shook his head. “It does look like they set you up—‘she was helping a prisoner escape.' You were supposed to get killed in the recovery process.”

“How many times did I thank you for coming in person?”

“Three. Enough. You want another drink?”

She shook her head. They were sitting in a leather-backed booth, in a dark, fairly noisy bar half a block from the San Diego branch of the Justice Department. It was too early to get drunk, but she thought Phil was close to smashed already. He'd had three vodka gimlets.

She thought about asking him to go to dinner with her, just for the company. But he might misunderstand. He'd feel pressured to come. His wife would be waiting at home …

“Anyway,” he said, “you should thank Hortense. She wasn't going to leave my damn office till I listened to her. Christ I can't believe you thought I'd set you up!”

“I wasn't exactly thinking rationally then. And no one seemed to check on me.”

“They told us you'd blown off the appointment! Said you never showed up at all! We thought you were rescheduling or something. I mean—who thought this shit was going on!”

She almost argued that. But finally, just waved her hand dismissively. “Whatever. I
did
thank Hortense. Took me all day Thursday to find her. We were like hugging and jumping around. She said she'd testify if somebody hid her out somewhere …”

“She might have to testify. I'm not sure how seriously she'll be taken in court but … you might need her to testify. Statewide's attorneys are still talking as if maybe they're going to go with the story that it was all a mix-up, and your story is some kid of revenge fantasy.”

She snorted. “Justice department knows better. The marshals found the girls in there.”

He nodded. “You got those women set free, and Skaffel's been arrested, and that Burse woman … that's something. I don't know how much more we can get. Almost everyone else is claiming they didn't know anything about Subpod 18 and they say all the organs in the medical annex were from voluntary inmate donors who died of natural causes.”

Faye tried to get the young waitress's attention, hoping for a glass of water. The young blond waitress was busy serving sailors from a carrier, laughing with them.

“Phil—Rita Burse, Skaffel, so what? There are hundreds of people there who should be in jail. And what about Pursair?”

“Denials, denials. The Congressman has golfing buddies who says he was with them.”

“Yeah I know but—what about getting people in the prison to testify that he was there? What about more arrests? What about investigating
the whole place?
What about a series of stories on Priority Central about the whole damn thing?”

He winced. “Well—you
did
your story.”

“It was
cursory,
Phil! They barely let me cover everything and they edited the hell out of it. They
say
they're going to let me do a full story after they do some ‘fact-checking' but that just seems like they're blowing smoke. I mean
—are they
going to let me do the story the way I want to?”

Phil licked his lips, and his fingers absently spun his empty glass on the table till it tipped over. He sighed. “Priority Media is going to go with the story that only a few people knew about Subpod 18. And they're not going to follow up on Rudy, or on Pursair …”

She stared at him. “When were you going to tell me this?”

“I'm telling you now. I found out while I was waiting for you to come out of the JD interview. I got some calls. I'm sorry but—a number of people on Priority's board of directors have a lot of money in Statewide, Faye. Some of them are pretty major stockholders. And Statewide's so
big
…”

“The whole prison system down there needs to be defunded, and just
taken apart,
Phil! Christ, I didn't even scratch the surface! Seven-seventy-five is just one pod out of … Phil there are
millions of people in Statewide
from all over the world! It can't be the only place like that! Privatized prisons have almost no oversight—no motivation to stay clean—”

“I know. Maybe other people will look into it. You can always write a book.”

“And hope someone publishes it.”

“And hope somebody
reads
it,” said Phil. “Look, Faye, even if you manage to get the word out, even if you blow the whistle louder and expose the whole thing …”

She stared at him. “What? What are you saying?”

“I'm saying, Faye, that nothing really decisive will be done about it. For the simple reason …” He shrugged. His eyes looked almost infinitely weary. “… that most people aren't like you. Most people just don't seem to care. That's all there is to it. It's just—almost nobody really cares …”

AND OTHER UNAUTHORIZED SUGGESTIONS

T
HE LATE GREAT SCIENCE
fiction writer Damon Knight wrote a classic short story called “The Country of the Kind” which tells us about a future society that is civil, humane, poverty-free, and almost without sociopaths. One selfish man is an exception, and is allowed to do as he pleases: stealing, wallowing in other people's homes, anything except for violence; however, he's imprinted with a terrible odor (which he himself cannot sense), and this extremely unpleasant stench warns people when he's coming.

He thinks of himself as the King of the World because he can take what he wants, but in fact he's a pariah.

Recently a headline read, “CEOs Who Collect Billions in Govt Money Demand Cuts to Programs for Poor, Elderly.” These same magnates, the “Council of CEOs,” seem peeved, very “how dare they” when the American public cries out, at intervals, about the shocking lack of social responsibility big business demonstrates.

But most of the public is not stupid. It's been burned before. It's burned every day. It's been a learning experience.

The public has learned. The contempt corporation PR liaisons have for the public's attention span is palpable; still, people were paying attention when it was revealed in the 1960s and '70s that most major manufacturers were poisoning us with pollution; people were paying attention when it was revealed that those manufacturers dragged their feet, and bit and scratched and struggled, when they were told to curtail their pollution. And people noticed when industry shrieked with wholly unconvincing outrage when it was told to clean up the toxic waste mess it had already made.

People noticed. The billions that the public is forced to spend on clean-ups were noticed. The astounding obliviousness to forethought in the Exxon Valdez and BP Gulf Spill disasters did not go unnoticed.

The public can see that most corporations just don't care unless they're forced to. Despite what may be touted in TV commercials, for every insignificant effort from an oil company on behalf of the environment, there are ten new environmental atrocities somewhere, ten efforts on the part of that industry's lobbyists to squelch laws demanding accountability.

Cancer strikes one in three Americans and kills one in four. According to Samuel Epstein, professor of occupational medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, millions people have died during the last decades in what Epstein calls “this cancer epidemic.” Epstein indicates that “there is plenty of evidence that the cancer increase is due to progressive permeation of air, water, food and the workplace with cancer-causing industrial chemicals and pesticides. There is also well-established
evidence that a substantial proportion of all cancers is avoidable.”

It may be that those deliberately sacrificing lives by knowingly permitting the release of needless carcinogens have convinced themselves that it's all for the sake of a healthy, unimpeded economy. Surely, they tell themselves, people would starve without industry.

In some secret, time-shared corner of their hearts they know full well that we could have industry, and jobs—even more jobs—without polluting, without toxifying, without cheating workers, without underpaying women—if we made the needed investment. Technology doesn't have to pollute. It's like a dog that hasn't been housebroken. To acknowledge that realization, though, would be to curtail their major drive in life: greed, in all its manifestations. The world is their smorgasbord.

Mitt Romney was half right when he said that “corporations are people,” since corporate culture is a reflection of its leadership. There are people at the top who give it its character. When they knowingly toxify, when they mistreat workers, when they bust unions and create dangerous working conditions for the sake of higher profits, they think they are “kings of the world”—and so far we have not impregnated them with a bad smell …

But we can. Not as literally as in Knight's allegorical story. But we can do it—with New Taboos.

We will still need punitive regulations. But we need something more, something lasting, something impregnated into our beings: the recognition that we aren't alone, that there is no social vacuum.

I suggest that we utilize a social device that is generally either underused or misused. The
taboo.

Taboos may seem primitive, and indeed many of the old ones are based on archaic religious ideas. But the better taboos are not based on superstition: they are complex, efficient, and self-perpetuating expressions of solid tribal values—that is, of social values.

Before I get to the inevitable list of New Taboos, we have to understand one premise: a thing being forbidden on the surface is not the same as its being truly taboo. A real taboo, worked into the weft and weave of the social fabric, programmed into the very conceptual master-molecule of psychological drives, is much more powerful than simple superficial disapproval.

How do you feel, in your gut, if someone violates a basic taboo and literally craps on your doorstep? Your revulsion, most likely, is profound. That's the profundity of taboo—and it's partly an aesthetic reaction. Violations of taboos are also violations of our aesthetic sense—Damn, that thing is ugly! It may well be that the most refined, evolved taboos are deep aesthetic responses.