Authors: Benjamin Parzybok
“Says he knows you,” Gregor said.
“Yeah,” Renee said. “Come on, Zach. I want to show you the map room.”
Gregor offered his hand to Zach again. “That’s a lot of clearance, boyfriend.” There was a warmness, and a warning, in the phrase.
Zach turned to follow Renee.
“If you want to put on a uniform—” Gregor said.
Renee shook her head. “No, he doesn’t. Come on, Zach.”
Halfway up the second flight of stairs Renee turned and embraced him. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “We’re barely keeping it together. People are dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Zach said, not knowing what else to say and feeling the joiner’s angst well up in him. Every cause he could ever remember being a part of had failed. He returned the hug until she released him.
Everything changed for Zach when he came into the map room. In the center of the room was a large round table with hundreds of scrawled notes. There were crumpled scraps of paper on the floor and a truly huge and impressive hand-drawn map that split the territory and its borders into several sectors laid across the wall and overlapping onto the ceiling and the floor.
“Hey, Zach, you made it.” Bea stood at the table inspecting a pile of notes. She waved noncommittally and went back to her work.
Zach traced his finger along the wall. Each house in the entire country was drawn out as a tiny square on the map. Inside the houses there were tiny scrawled messages, or just ID numbers. Along the streets, routes for water trucks and trash trucks were traced. There were dotted lines for bicycle delivery routes and little sentry box symbols for border guards.
“I want you to meet Leroy,” Renee said and steered him to the far side of the room, her hand on his lower back guiding him.
A wiry black man turned around from what he was working on. He had a fistful of white paper in one hand and a Sharpie in the other. Zach held out a hand to shake.
Leroy looked down at his two occupied hands, then back at Zach, and nodded, and then Leroy started from Zach’s feet and scanned him up. It was a naked feeling, as if his whole body lay atop a photocopier glass. When Leroy looked him in the eyes again, he could see at work on his face a sincere struggle to fabricate some idle talk or perform some other leavening social convention. “The weather . . .” Leroy said and then held up the hand that bore the sharpie, waved it dismissively in the air as if to scratch out his comment. He turned and went back to his work.
“He’s busy,” Renee said. “This is his map.”
Zach spent the next while going through the pieces of the system. He learned how the notes arrived, how directives were given, how things were balanced and issues dealt with. He watched Bea and Leroy argue over whether an outpost ought to be written as permanent or temporary and he drank in the room; the immense amount of information induced vertigo. He was euphoric.
Renee sat down in a big leather chair in middle of the room and pulled out a bottle of some kind of hand-labeled alcohol from a hidden drawer in the side of the chair. “The perks of being in charge.” She poured them each a glass several times larger than Zach felt comfortable with. “One of the very few. We’re starting up a distillery. This?” She swept her hand toward the room. “This is not my specialty.” She patted his hip. “I was hoping you—well. Take a look around, sweet thing.” She took a deep swallow, grimaced, closed her eyes, and leaned her head back. “See what you think. And then later, maybe you’d go on a date with me? I need a date. I’m glad you’re here, Zach.”
While her eyes were closed he rested his hand on her forehead and studied her. There was something mortally tired about her. He supposed that transitioning from running a cafe to your own empire could do that to a person. He wished they were in a dark bedroom alone together. How many warlords went back to managing cafes? How many lived to a ripe age? He bent and kissed her lips and then inspected the room.
Bea and Leroy squabbled about another section of the map. There was shuffling at the door and a man dressed in uniform stepped in and put a three-inch stack of notes in a basket there. Incoming data, Zach realized. He wondered if his own note, generated in his exchange with the border guard, lay in the bin and he went to inspect the incoming. There were notes for everything—the Rangers wrote down all interactions in Sherwood. “The swing set in Alberta park is broken.” “Mrs. Homes is too unsteady to carry her unit gallon from her front door to the kitchen counter.” “National Guard has two jeeps and six soldiers parked at MLK and Fremont—they’re setting up some kind of structure there.” “Jahrain suspects his neighbor of taking an extra ration for someone he claims lives there but doesn’t.” They collected everything. Zach looked up at the wall and at the carpet of discarded messages and the diagnosis came to him easily: information fatigue. The data crashed like a great wave into the room each day, inundating them. With no proper analysis of the data, no sense of trends, and no indicators, they would never understand the effect of their actions.
After he’d read several dozen notes and made the rounds of the rooms, he realized he’d done this before. I’ve played this game, he thought. He had burned thousands of hours playing Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Settlers, and other strategy games, and he’d done this for clients, too. Here was simply a massive real-life version. He found some scratch paper and began to sketch out plans for status meters. Indicators of the empire. Information was not power, it was the ability to synthesize data where the power lay, and he could give them that. He could give
her
that, he thought, and he hummed to himself with pleasure as he worked.
He took all of the stacks out of the incoming basket and began to sort them across the floor.
“Zach!” Bea said.
“Don’t worry! I know what I’m doing!” he said.
“Let him,” Renee slurred, her eyes still closed, “he’s a smartypants.”
Martin came to splayed out in the wooden wheelbarrow-bike contraption in time to hear a shit-storm of swearing from the two dark forms digging a hole,
his
hole, in the dim moonlit graveyard. He couldn’t quite follow th
e gist of it, but one of the assholes had apparently hit the other with his shovel.
He could feel death hover close. A rotund, corpulent, drought-fed reaper, scratching its ass and waiting for him to close his eyes that last time so that it could slaver away over his soul. His da’ would be there, wherever this reaper took him, and Martin regretted not for the first time how rusty he’d let his Russian get. Martin wriggled one arm free and tore a face-hole in the plastic bag they’d put him in. A cool wind blew grit into his eye socket. Martin sighed
“fuck”
in a long, despairing exhale, in pain and tired to be alive. He was going to have to do something about it now. In the chaos of the argument, he quietly tore open the rest of the plastic bag and then levered his naked, lumbering form over the edge of the contraption and rolled himself away into the night like a little burrito.
When he was far enough away, he stood and walked toward the border on the far side of the cemetery. He’d be a real fucking horror for any accidental bystander, he was sure. He found a hole in the chain-link fence and squeezed himself through it, scoring his middle with scratches. Then he stood and held up his middle finger at the territory. Oh he would be back all right, he thought, answering the unasked question, motherfucking right he would.
Zach scratched out a to-do list, remembering all the citywide campaigns they’d pitched to the mayor while working at Patel & Grummus. Inevitably there was something written on the back of the paper he used—this one had a fragm
ent of what looked like someone’s insurance policy from a decade back. All the scratch paper in HQ had been acquired in a donation drive, much like everything else: printers, computers, office supplies, paint, tools, lumber, odd items here and there. All Maid Marian had to do was put Needed for Sherwood on any outgoing correspondence and it poured in.
On the list he put:
Marketing objective:
Instill sense of unique Sherwood culture
by manufacturing cultural artifacts and pop-culture events
Zach leaned back into the couch in the middle of the map room and stared at the ceiling, wondering if one day other neighborhoods would be drawn there.
“How we doing, Leroy?”
“Mm,” Leroy said.
“Awesome. We’re doing awesome.”
Leroy didn’t answer.
“How much do you think people know they’re being governed by a dictator? Does it cross their mind that there’s no vote?”
It was him and Leroy, and he hadn’t exactly managed to have any involved conversations with him yet. Though there was no denying that, though the man was reticent, he was highly attuned to the system. A memory like a Swiss watch. Exactly the type of person you wanted in the nerve center. At the corner of his list he penciled, “LR happy? Something we could do?”
“It’s in the news, but I think we need to bring up the subject of dictator before it hits the street too much. I’ll write a letter.” Zach loved writing letters. Had there ever been a more personal way to reach people? He grabbed a fresh sheet of paper.
“Instead of introductions, considering how many of us there are,” the mayor said, “could you all introduce yourself before you speak?”
“Should I . . . then?”
“Yes, thank you.” The mayor adjusted his reading glasses and stared down at the paper in front of him, and then looked up at the small, nervous man across the table. Around thirty people, he estimated, sat around the four large conference tables they’d fitted together in order to house this particular task force.
“My name is Ernest Weatermeyer. I run—ran a small company that creates pet supplies. In Beaverton. We, you know, there was like for fleas and other pests, and also other chemical-based products to control animal smell and—I am still not quite sure why I’ve been asked to come here?”
“I can explain that, Ernest, and—”
“Please introduce yourself, Margaret,” the mayor said.
“Household Efficiency Task Force, Sellwood Lead. You’re here because of the smell issue. You fabricate urine—what do you call it?”
“Odor removal?”
The mayor noted that Ernest was beginning to look alarmed, as if invited to his own inquisition.
“How much can you make?”
“Sorry, I—we haven’t been in operation for some time now and—is there something, is something wrong?”
“Let me give you some back story,” the mayor said, holding up a hand in what he hoped was a friendly, sliding sort of wave to deflect Margaret who, being part bulldog herself, might need some urine odor removal afterward for her own use. “Did you not get the task force mission statement?” The mayor gestured to his economics development advisor to hand Ernest the one-pager. “Thanks. Read it on your own time, but essentially we’re looking at ways to improve household efficiency. One possible solution we’ve been looking into which would work in concert with our new simultaneous flush initiative is for—for, well, men
specifically
, and anyone who cared to take it on, to urinate in the back of the toilet tank.”
Ernest held the one-pager and nodded eagerly but, the mayor could tell, uncomprehendingly.
“You see where you might fit in, then? No. OK.” The mayor quickly rounded up facial expressions around the perimeter of the table, taking a quick read. Postures appeared dug in for an extended meeting. Unit gallons stood like small sentry robots in front of each participant. “Limited water resources puts an enormous strain on the sewage system, you understand. Wastewater needs to be recycled.”
A hand was raised at the far edge of the table and the bearer spoke: “Anthony Brinestone from St. John’s, former corporate defense lawyer. They call it Savewater in Sherwood.”
“Yes,” the mayor said and with his left hand he pinched the thigh of his own leg hard enough that his eyes watered, “thank you, Tony. Are you with us here, Ernest?”
“You have a smell issue? Sir but—”
“How much do you believe you could produce, and does it neutralize or can you describe what happens, on a chemical-level, I mean? You’re a chemist, correct?”
The mayor watched it click in for Ernest, that a market opportunity had presented itself the likes of which he had not seen before. They were making progress now. But as with any thought of progress, the progress arms race with that
other nation
emerged, a race in which they were impossibly behind.
As others took on the substance of the meeting, the mayor slouched subtly into his chair, letting his face swivel from speaker to speaker, in the oft-employed expression of attentiveness of which he was a master. It was difficult not to shake the sense that it was meaningless progress. He felt he understood more clearly than ever before how a country might go to war, envious of another’s prosperity, its citizens defecting or becoming restless. The urge to invent a mythology of evilness around that other, more successful nation compelling. Ernest, it appeared, had decided to fully capitalize on his supposed expertise and was now pontificating grandly and with self-importance. The mayor sighed and shifted a little more deeply into his seat. The phrase
Task Force
, to him, once noble with the ring of super-heroes, now felt more akin to an army of tortoises, wandering slow over the desert, aimless.
For task forces, god love them, were full of
citizens
. He tilted his notebook so that he might sketch the three citizen archetypes, putting each in a heroic stance. There was
the
aging, inflexible do-gooder
, who when pressed spoke in indignant barks, fervent and jaw-clenching, never satisfied, constipation incarnate. There was
the unselfconscious rambler
, whose thoughts littered the sea of her mind like flotsam, and who could be persuaded into nearly any viewpoint, provided the right eloquence. And finally
the shiny-eyed optimist
, usually young and idealistic, whose energy matched only her/his naiveté and who would, in time, morph into one of the two previous types. Once sketched he appreciated his work—he’d always been a decent doodler. He drew a
TF
emblem on the character’s chests, and gave them
TASK FORCE
boots and Zorro-style masks. And lo, he was their leader, surely manifested out of one of the types drawn, driven a touch further by ambition. This, then, was what made the world turn! Behind them, he sketched himself, his cape blowing in the wind. There were other ways to win, besides a war of progress.
He looked up from his work and scanned the room and noticed that all eyes were on him, waiting expectantly.
“Yes exactly,” he said, “an excellent point, and thank you.” He could see he hadn’t hit the required response yet. “Sorry, I was having an interesting thought—” he smiled absently, “—and so where were we, Margaret?” For a moment he’d given them complete control, his mental absence ceding the decision process to the citizen committee—and he could feel them all biting into the responsibility at hand more deeply for it.