The Gone-Away World (3 page)

“We've gotta go down there and
put that fucker out,
blow it out, uh,
like a fucking candle,
otherwise . . .” At which point he trailed his voice and let the breath flow out of him and he paused to let us construct our own metaphor for catastrophe. And that right there is what you call a rhetorical ellipsis, the cheapest device in oratory and one of the hardest to do well. An ellipsis is like a haymaker punch you throw with your mouth, and the only tricks more low rent than that are making fun of your opponent's ugly puss and bringing up something by saying you won't mention it. We all stared at him for a minute, and he went sort of pinkish and closed his mouth.

“Explosives,” Gonzo said, and Jim Hepsobah nodded.

“Have to be,” Jim said.

“Make a vacuum?”

“Yup.”

“Is that going to work with FOX?”

“Ought to.”

“Need a very big bang,” Annie the Ox pointed out.

“Oh, yeah,” said Gonzo.

“Can't have it catch again after,” Annie went on. “Helluva big bang. Can we get that big of a bang?”

Annie the Ox was a blunt-fingered woman with big cheeks who knew about explosives. She had narrow, solid shoulders and heavy forearms and thighs, and she collected puppet heads. It was impossible to say whether Annie collected these things because she liked to have soft, plush friends to talk to, or if they were faces for the people in her life who were Gone Away. I had never asked, because some things are private, and Annie was not the kind of person who answered questions about private things.

She looked at Jim and Gonzo. They looked at Sally. Sally looked at Dickwash.

“Yes,” Dickwash said, with absolute certainty. “I can fix that.”

It always creeps me out being with pencilnecks. Anything over a type E and you can get the feeling what you're talking to isn't entirely human, and you're not entirely wrong. A guy named Sebastian once explained it to me like this:

Suppose you are Alfred Montrose Fingermuffin, capitalist. You own a factory, and your factory uses huge industrial metal presses to make Fingermuffin Thingumabobs. Great big blades powered by hydraulics come stomping down on metal ribbon (like off a giant roll of tape, only made of steel) and cut Thingumabobs out like gingerbread men. If you can run the machine at a hundred Thingumabobs per minute, six seconds for ten Thingumabobs (because the machine prints ten at a time out of the ribbon), then you're doing fine. The trouble is that although in theory you could do that, in fact you have to stop the machine every so often so that you can check the safeties and change shifts. Each time you do, the downtime costs you, because you have the machine powered up and the crew are all there (both crews, actually, on full pay). So you want to have that happen the absolute minimum number of times per day. The only way you can know when you're at the minimum number of times is when you start to get accidents. Of course, you're always going to get
some
accidents, because human beings screw up; they get horny and think about their sweethearts and lean on the Big Red Button and someone loses a finger. So you reduce the number of shifts from five to four, and the number of safety checks from two to one, and suddenly you're much closer to making Fingermuffin's the market leader. Mrs. Fingermuffin gets all excited because she's been invited to speak at the WI, and all the little Fingermuffins are happy because their daddy brings them brighter, shinier, newer toys. The downside is that your workers are working harder and having to concentrate more, and the accidents they have are just a little worse, just a little more frequent. The trouble is that you can't go back, because now your competitors have done the same thing and the Thingumabob market has gotten a bit more aggressive, and the question comes down to this: how much further can you squeeze the margin without making your factory somewhere no one will work? And the truth is that it's a tough environment for unskilled workers in your area and it can get pretty bad. Suddenly, because the company can't survive any other way, soft-hearted Alf Fingermuffin is running the scariest, most dangerous factory in town. Or he's out of business and Gerry Q. Hinderhaft has taken over, and everyone knows how hard Gerry Q. pushes his guys.

In order to keep the company alive, safeguard his family's happiness and his employees' jobs, Alf Montrose Fingermuffin (that's you) has turned into a monster. The only way he can deal with that is to separate himself into two people—Kindly Old Alf, who does the living, and Stern Mr. Fingermuffin, factory boss. His managers do the same. So when you talk to Alf Fingermuffin's managers, you're actually not talking to a person at all. You're talking to a part in the machine that is Fingermuffin Ltd., and (just like the workers in the factory itself ) the ones who are best at being a part are the ones who function least like a person and most like a machine. At the factory this means doing everything at a perfect tempo, the same way each time, over and over and over. In management it means living profit, market share and graphs. The managers ditch the part of themselves which thinks, and just get on with running the programme in their heads.

So this almost certainly wasn't going to be easy. But unless there was an earthquake or another war, Gonzo was going, which meant I was going, and if we were going, the chances were the crew would come with us to make sure we were okay, and incidentally to make sure we didn't do something amazingly cool which we could then rag them about, and finally to make sure we didn't come back zillionaires and rub their noses in it before setting them up for life. Gonzo Lubitsch is addicted to playing the lead. I work for a living, I take my bonus home to my wife, and we get drunk and naked and we act like teenagers and feed each other pizza.

Back to the bar: Sally had Dick Washburn penned up in a farmhouse with the entire Mexican army coming down on him. He'd come in rock 'n' roll, thought he'd wrap the truckjocks by five and get his aerobicised backside back to the city and sink a few martinis and
My God, Vivian, the place was a hellhole!
But Sally has negotiator
gong fu
of the first order. In the small world of civil freebooting companies, she is the go-to girl, the top cat, the queen bee and the
wakasensei,
and her eyes undress the fine print and her fingers trace its outlines and she knows it, owns it, makes it sit up and beg for her touch like a happy gimp. The pencilneck was watching his Christmas bonus shrink like a white truffle in January, and the reckless testosterone feeling he had come in with was fading with it. Vivian's body in its Lycra workout gear was vanishing and being replaced by the possibility that Sally was handing him his head. So Dick Washburn dug deep and dark into his management-school magic set and tried an end-run, a wicked, one-pill-for-all-ills solution, which is maybe what he intended to do all along: isolate Sally and get us to make the deal for him. A type D pencilneck has
vestigial
humanity, which is the kind you can fit in a cigarette case and offer people at parties.

“The trucks,” Dick Washburn said.

“What about them?” asked Sally.

“At the end of the run,” the pencilneck said, “you can keep the trucks. They're amazing trucks.” He hit the word “truck” just a little harder each time, and when he said it the third time, everyone in the room heard it above the ambient bustle. Jim looked up and Sally looked back at him like she knew there was a thing happening, but she didn't know how to stop it.

“Really
amazing,
” the pencilneck repeated.

Sally pointed out that we had trucks; that our possession of and facility in the handling of trucks was central to our professed identity as truckers, which in turn was key in regard to the pencilneck's presence in our midst, that presence being a consequence of his desire to deploy those talents in the service of the populace and the enterprise for which he was plenipotentiary spokesperson, ambassador and man on the ground, and in whose short-term interest he now sought to bilk, cheat, con and bamboozle us out of due legal and contractual protections in line with industry practice and good solid common sense, but whose shareholders would, like the aforementioned wider population, unquestionably look with disfavour and consequent litigiousness upon the inevitable wranglings and disputations resulting from said rooking, hornswoggling, grifting and humbuggery, should any ill befall in the due exercise of our discretion and judgement in the course of whatever hare-brained adventure the party of the first part (the pencilneck) chose to inflict upon the soft skin and girlish charms of the party of the second part (the naive and open-hearted drivers of the toughest and most competent civil freebooting company in the world).

“We can fix all that,” the pencilneck said. “You have to come,” he leered, “and see the
trucks.
” And that time he made it sound like your first orgasm, or maybe your last.

So we did. Sally reluctantly, Jim calmly, Gonzo eagerly, Tobemory Trent sidewise like a crab and all the rest of us according to our lights, we went out of the Nameless Bar and into the Nameless Parking Lot. The pencilneck waved his arms, and forward they came with a grumble and a clatter, with a great white light and the smell of fresh rubber and vinyl and engine, and lo, there were trucks indeed.

But not trucks as we knew them. These were the trucks of legend, the trucks every vehicle with more than six wheels dreams of being. They were black and chrome and they stank of raunchy fuel consumption and throbbing power. If these trucks could have sung, they'd have sung base, deep and slow and full of the Delta. They had leather seats and positioning systems and armoured glass. They were factory new and they had our number plates already on 'em, and there was a hula girl on the dashboard of Baptiste Vasille's, and a stack of pornographic images in Samuel P.'s, and Gonzo's truck had flames on the side and Sally Culpepper's had a red suede dash. Someone out there understood us, our needs, our mad little schticks, the things without which we weren't the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (CEO Sally J. Culpepper, presiding), we were just guys and girls in pound shop clothes.

In other words, this was a honey trap. If you're giving guys like us kit like that to do a gig like this, it's because either 1) you're going to make a ton of profit or 2) you don't think we have a rat's chance of coming back alive. Most like, it's both.

But then again that was hardly news. If they could have done it themselves—if they hadn't been too damned scared to take on what needed to be done, for fear of their silk-socked lives—they never would have come to us. The Free Company was on the clock and there were only three commandments: look after your friends; do the job; come out richer. To these the pencilneck was adding an apocrypha of penalties for excessive damage and materials overspend which we fully intended to ignore, because he was the tool of a litigation-wary softass outfit and they were afraid not only of death but also of flesh-eating lawyers and class actions and angry investors and antitrust and whatall, and the first and second commandments forbid stinting during a run. Thus we gazed upon his many provisos and codicils, and we said “bah.”

Basic plan:

1. go to place A (depot) and pick up item X (big box go boomboom)

2. take it to place B (the pumping station), which is undergoing state Q (on fire,
v. v. bad
)

3. introduce item X to place B (big box go boomboom, burning pumping station; burning pumping station, big box go boomboom.
Shake hands. Didn't we meet once over at van Kottler's place? Gosh, darn,
I believe we did!
) and instigate reaction P (boomboom, bang bang-a-diddly, BOOM) and hence state R (oxygen deprival, pseudo-vacuum,
schlurrrrrp
!) thus extinguishing B (∼Q, ∼P,
so sorry, dear old thing, have
to go, children have school tomorrow, ciao-ciao mwah-mwah
), thus

4. making enough money to buy a small nation-state, farm watawabas and eat mango all day long (
boo-yah, sing hallelujah, we didn't die
).

The question I should have been asking all this time—the thing which we all should have been wanting to know, pressingly and insistently—is this: how the hell did part of the Pipe, the all-ways-up most enduring and secure object ever manufactured by human hands and human engineering; the triple-redundant, safe-tastic product of the most profoundly dedicated collaboration in history; how did this invulnerable thing come to catch fire at all? And when you put it like that, the answer is obvious:

Someone made it so.

But hey. We're not those kindsa people. We are can-do, not what-about—except for me, maybe. The pencilneck smiled at Sally Culpepper, and his victory grin went a bit slack as he realised we'd never had any intention of saying no, and we knew that he knew that we were expected to lose people. Just for a second I thought perhaps he was ashamed. And then he looked down at his feet and caught a glimpse of his messed up year's-salary shoes, and he hated this stupid, ugly and above all
cheap
place, and his pencilneckhood rolled back as he found that part of himself which was indifferent, and he slipped gently into the warm water of not giving a damn.

Look at him again: this is not Dick Washburn you're seeing, not exactly. Dick has vacated possession for this bit of chat. Standing here is not Richard Godspeed Washburn, who sustained a nasty concussion on his fifteenth birthday, the very eve of the Go Away War, and who spent his next weeks in darkness and candlelight as the hospital he had gone to slowly shut down and ran out and fell apart, then grew to manhood in the new, broken world. This is not Quick Dick of the Harley Street Boys, who—before the orphanfinders came and settled him in a home of sorts and things got somewhat normal once again—could open the rear door of an army truck and pinch a pound of chocolate before the soldiers ever knew. This is Jorgmund itself, staring through Dick's eyes and measuring things as numbers and profit margins. Of course, Jorgmund is nothing more than a shared hallucination, a set of rules which make up Richard Washburn's job, and every time he does this—slips away from a human situation and lets the pattern use his mind and his mouth because he'd rather not make the decision himself—he edges a little closer to being a type C pencilneck. He loses a bit of his soul. There's a flicker of pain and anger in him as the animal he is feels the machine he is becoming take another bite, and snarls in its cage, deep down beneath his waxed, buff pectorals and his second-best (or ninth-best) suit. But it's really a very small animal, and not one of the fiercer ones.