For his integrity, Leon lived on the Cross. Much table kvetch centered on his wild-hair schemes to cut down paperwork, which would mean less employment. His memos were few, brief and lucid, heretical to calcified supervisors who saw ruin in their comprehensibility.
"He don't read the Style Manual. You don't begin, you implement. You don't rush, you expedite. Pebbles is a square peg in a round hole."
"But what are we doing?" Leon lamented to Charity over his mineral water and ulcer tablets. He didn't need the pills since his death, but they were habit, like his compulsive efficiency. "Nothing, that's what. Pounding sand down a rat hole, and the less they do, the longer the job description."
Heads turned at the bar: Pebbles had spoken a taboo word. In this area Leon was Judas himself to other workers. Lengthy memos were always coming down from somewhere to be read, initialed and passed on. Never less than ten single-spaced pages, they boiled down to the need for efficiency and cutting paperwork. To keep one's job from going under the ax, one's function must be represented as vital, complex and sufficiently incomprehensible to dazzle the job analysts. Trash burners alone, Leon's department, became End Product Evaluation Engineers with job descriptions couched in syntax that defied translation -
- conceive, establish and maintain an effective system of end product evaluation and final action implementation of same . . . (see para. 27a above).
Not so the traitor Pebbles, who, throwing caution and the Manual to the winds, was brash enough to write: All material comes to me in large bundles, which I bag and burn. There are twenty-five of us to do this where ten would be enough.
A marked and friendless man. Bloody but unbowed, Leon prophesied to Charity with Old Testament wrath: "Someday, the Lord's anger and just plain COMMON SENSE, by God, is going to reach down and rewrite every by God job description in this dead-ass place. BOOM! You wait."
Leon plodded back to his job, threading his way through the tables, glowering at the sludge in the wheels of progress. "Just wait . . . boom."
The band played on, workers muttered into their watered drinks. Barion sent more agitated messages to his brother -
BARION TO COVUL: ADVISE. READY YET?.
COYUL TO BARION: NOT. WILL NOT OPEN UNREHEARSED.
BARION TO COYUL: HURRY REPEAT HURRY. IF SUSPICIONS CORRECT, OUR TYPE ENERGY FORMS WITHIN SOLAR SYSTEM, GROWING STRONGER.
COYUL TO BARION: YOU MEAN WE CAN GO HOME?.
BARION TO COYUL: YOU UNBELIEVABLE ASS, I AM TALKING ABOUT JUDGMENT DAY. OURS. VERY LITERAL AND VERY NEAR. HURRY.
29 - The treadmills of your mind
The Club Banal and her own place in it were faintly absurd to Charity. The description occurred to her out of the blue like so many others lately. Absurd. Pathetic. She'd always recognized the words in reading but not often enough to work them into her own vocabulary.
"Ab-surd." She tasted the word. "Ridiculous. Re-dundant. That's me, all right."
The threefold business of the club churned onward through eternity. The bad brass ensemble slammed its musical assault against the harsh-lit tiles of the bar walls, the men of Accounting brooded and complained, Leon Pebbles seethed and muttered, "Boom . . ." The line of glum men shuffled forward to see the girls, browsed the Green Room and from there passed on to see what fantasy might beckon from the rooms.
With Charity's outbreak of new vocabulary came an increased desire to read, although the Green Room held little nourishment, mostly Harlequin romances read and reread by the girls until they had to be held together with rubber bands. Charity once devoured them like potato chips; now they seemed insipid. The heroines were all vanilla versions of herself in better clothes, the heroes all Woody Barnes with better chances. For the waiting
male customers, there was a shelf of "Bor" novels or something like that, not very interesting to Charity although she hewed her way through one or two from desperation. The men in these stories were all grim studs and all the women started out getting raped and ended up loving it. These books were kept on a shelf labeled "comedy" by the Puerto Rican girl, Esperanza, who had been raped at the age of thirteen and hadn't cared for it at all.
"Guy who wrote this oughta do three to five in a horny cell block, see how he likes it," Esperanza suggested darkly. "Hey, who took my Harlequin? I ain't done yet."
There were also some fat paperbacks called sword-and-sorcery, usually in three or more unreadable volumes each. Charity couldn't relate to fairies beyond Walt Disney. As for destiny-haunted princes - always getting hidden with poor folks at birth and then going on dangerous quests to find out who they really were - well, she'd been there with Dane and came close to a second heart attack and didn't need a replay. But fat Shirley (a.k.a. Lady Ellivare) read them over and over, sometimes starting with volume five and working backward.
"I can't help it," she confessed to Charity over her book and a box of chocolates. "I relate to all the destinies within me. How could I not, being Dion Fortune in my last life?"
There were other neo-pagans like Shirley among the Club ladies. They practiced a religion of emancipation and joy and were terribly serious about it, chanting their prayers to the Goddess in the fruity overtones of Eastern Star chapter ladies attempting Medea. They reminded Charity of Purdy Simco on a fired-up night in the tabernacle. The Catholic girls burned candles to the Virgin in their rooms, and gossiped back and forth through the thin walls between tricks and often during them. Protestant and Jewish girls just got bored and did their nails, talked about leaving and finding a steady man and never did either.
Essie Mendel loved to talk about her boyfriend in Accounting, upon whom her eye was fixed with iron patience but dimming hope. This swain, like his father, had died of overwork, prostate cancer and his mother.
"But he still spends every weekend with her in Ultimate Rise. Even with her around, I'm going to live there one day," Essie vowed. "Oh, Char, those hu-wongous living rooms where all your friends can come and see and owe you. The icebox with all that food. It's to die."
"You never get hungry," Charity reasoned, already jaded with Ultimate Rise. "Bor-ing."
Essie Mendel was a born consumer. "How can anything so rich be boring?"
Monotony was usual, but now and then diversion reared its head when a holy war broke out among the girls. The neo-pagans were always swiping novena candles from the Catholics to use in their circles. The most recent skirmish pitted wiry little Esperanza against Shirley, goddamning and screw-you-ing each other to a standoff, Elvira wedged between them laboring for peace.
"Shirley, give Esperanza back her candles right now. I gave you a nice new Bic lighter just last week."
"I will not use a plastic lighter to purify my circle! The candles were mine to begin with. And my name, goddamnit, is EL-LIVARE!"
Esperanza strained to get at her. "It's mud you don't gimme my candles, puta. All that goddess 'n' nature shit and running around in a fancy bathrobe and stealing my candles ain't got nada to do with God."
"Of course not!" Shirley screeched, stung in the center of religious principle. "You sellout female eunuch!"
"Elvira, what the fuck she talking about? Some witch," Esperanza jeered. "Couldn't even charm the fat off her own ass."
"Oh, give her the damn candles." Shirley-Ellivare retired with the tatters of her dignity. "How can she understand the Goddess? Never even finished high school."
Charity could never see any sense in the physical inspection for the customers beforehand or the forms they filled out or the pro station stop afterward. "I mean, they're dead, aren't they? What can they catch? Jake said this place was real." Charity wailed her frustration and perplexity. "None of it is real!"
"Well, of course it's not." Elvira went on checking her bar invoice. "And then again it is. Look at those men in the line. What else was ever more real to any of them? They never knew much about women or sex or anything outside of their silly jobs. What else would they bring along?"
They'd tried dropping the pro station and the forms, Elvira pointed out. The customers missed the gap in normalcy. They enjoyed waiting in line, telling the same old jokes to the same friends, visiting the same women, creatures of habit even beyond death. They needed to touch something. Charity's working room was situated between the pro stop and the bar. The men came and talked to her for a few minutes before returning to work or another drink.
She'd never understood men very much, she realized now, or her own role in relation to them beyond a gut-level knowledge that life was not all that easy before marriage and tough as hell after, and you put up with each other.
A few passed up her open door; most came in, sat down on the off-yellow futon and talked to her. Talked at her, rather, falsely hearty, ultimately shy and wary of women on a one-to-one basis beyond the sexual mechanics. The rules, the forms and pro station helped them keep at a distance an experience and a being they knew very little about and feared a great deal. In time Charity came to feel her ten minutes the most essential in the whole production line. More than sex, it was the communication they starved for, part of them knowing what the rest denied, that they needed to touch, make contact with something beyond themselves.
Virgil Bassett was with her now. Virgil died of weight and worry as a surrogate for identity, reciting his life in tones leaden with resignation. Always there had been his gray job on a diaper service delivery route, and his discontented wife, whose chief ambition had been to head the Myrtle Beach Daughters of the Confederacy but who never flowered beyond the entertainment committee, thwarted throughout her days. Joy for Virgil Bassett translated to the few hours in his basement shop for meditation and the delicate art of kite making.
"Most relaxing thing I can think of, 'less it's flying "em," he rambled pleasurably. "Certain summer days on the beach you get them updrafts, thermals, and that old kite'll stay up there breakfast to sundown. No strain, just a gentle pull on your line, but you know you got a friend up there. It's beautiful . . ."
He never knew the score any more than I did. Charity felt the compassion well up from deep inside for all of them and not a little for herself. Hell, there's no mystery between men and women, except why some poor damn fool like me ain't figured that out yet. He's just like me, spent a lot of time just wishing someone would really look at him and listen to him like he was a human being and mattered. We lived with bullshit rules back there and more down here. Least we can do is make up our own.
With the subversive insight came an irrepressible urge. "Hey, Virg." She winked at him. "Knock knock."
Interrupted in his dearest soliloquy, thermal updrafts and the nagging tyrannies of his wife, Virgil could only stare at her.
"Come on, knock knock. Say who's there?"
"Who's there?"