Jennifer Webb
BETTER, CLEANER, KINDER
It is the future. The city is set on stilts, balancing over what was once soggy swampland, now tamed and cultured, at least in parts. The original city plans and the engineers' models show a cuboid space, steel-topped, steel-grounded, suspended on naked wires. That model city is lovely, its sides are air, only guyropes separate the ceiling from the floor, and narrow streets vein its depths while precise edges carve its space out of the sky. It couldn't be fully realised, of course. The city proper looks lumberingly wistful, it lacks that transcendent airiness, the buildings are high-sided with fewer windows than you'd expect and heavier doors. The cuboid shape remains, but buttresses of steel lift the roof from the base, and though the sides seem to be made of air, in fact they're pure perspex, a seamless sheet which holds the world together, a demarcation mark through which the citizens can gaze. A sense of rights has been retained. At any time the citizens may move about the city, and look out through a different side, onto a different prospect. (And they do.) Their lives are shaped by choice.
Things are not as different as you might think. There are no airships slipping between the buildings, and for all the yearned-for glass and steel; the city planners were reduced to concrete blocks. Budget problems. Anyway, glass shatters so easily under pressure. In the paper just the other day was a report about beer bottles exploding in moments of stress, and with the sorts of pressures under which the city has lately laboured, bursting bottles have been popping off like fireflies. One thousand, two hundred and fifty four people were injured here over the past twelve months. (No deaths yet.) Beer's been banned.
There are many things banned, but the citizens don't mind. Down the road from the City Hall is a slender building, very slender, it fits the very acute angle formed by two streets and is barely wide enough to pirouette. The two bottom stories are occupied by a small man who lives upstairs and runs the store downstairs, at street level. Each morning he comes down from his narrow bed and sets the billboards out on the pavement. He sells newspapers and magazines and a range of pencils. Each morning he unlocks the door—click, shick, jingle, clack—and shakes out the welcome mat, and steps through the door so that he can look up and then down his street. What he sees is mainly light, and tall buildings paved with plaster, and much writing on the walls and the surface of the road. And walking about in the city, many other small people who look—maybe not busy, as such; but—dedicated, that's the word carefully printed on the cover of his order book. This is the future, this is maybe our future, and in that future, our existential loneliness—aloneness—has been
composted, has decayed into rich humus. Yes, we're regulated in these future days, but it's made us safe. We're regulated, and with that regulation has come the serenity of being one of us, knowing that dammit yes it's us, I'm us, god dammit, hooray. In that future, the Us who here and now would be Them to him—or to be more accurate, to whom he would necessarily be Them—will welcome him as a fellow, without regard to difference, all one, one and all.
Yeah, right. That's one prospect maybe. I'm not sure whether I like it or not.
Here and now, meantime, it is cold. I am cold here in the present, and although in my tropical home the monsoon brings waves of tepid wet air to bubble the blood in my throat, I feel a centre of ice, silent snow, bitter snow, that keeps me just skiing above the surface of my day-to-day responsibilities.
Like going to sleep, like getting up, like emptying the garbage to control cockroaches because otherwise you just know the pest control officers will be there banging at the door with their warrants and their sprays, will humiliate me yet again. Like cooking, like cleaning, like shopping, like fronting up every day at this huge commercial laundry where for hour after hour in the steamy bump and grind I will be going one-two, snatch and jerk, slide and heave, and it's one-two again, one-two. Heavy work. But with some variety at least: single sheets, double sheets, queens; pillowslips; hand towels, bath towels, tea towels.
Anyway, the alternative is another sweating walled workshop and there it would be third-bolt, left-front-fender, third-bolt, left-front-fender, eight hours every day, and I'm lucky I live over here in this, the greatest town in the greatest state in the greatest country, and I'm lucky I have a job and I'm lucky I have my health and I'm lucky, I'm lucky, I'm so fucking lucky.
Oh, oh, oh.
This is a science fiction story of sorts. In these days of literary pastiche and the standard fracturing of genres, I need to signal precisely how this should be read. It's not that I don't trust your judgment. It's just that everything's become so slippery that you never can tell where literature's going to scoot off to next, and I want you fixed, here, listening to me. As we move towards the next millennium, which even now is creeping up on us in the night.
This future is one of rules and compensatory gestures. Graffiti is outlawed, but the city authorities provide standard-sized white cards on which people can jot their stories, or draw their images, and notice boards on which they may be pinned, up and down the streets. The city provides for all needs. Those little
i1rsjc.
cards are displayed for ten days, and then are removed to make room for the next set. The old ones are placed in storage bins, to be collected by the owners. I write my own tales for the story boards, and when I go to pin them up, I sort through the previous fortnight's rejects and steal the stories others have written, if they take my fancy. For instance:
Stolen story #1
My ear was bitten off by an angry dog, and plastic surgeons are constructing a new one. They are growing it out of my own skin, on my chest. There is an ear growing
out of my chest. Man, 47 years
Stolen story #2
Our local constable found two thousand dollars in loose coins, and two severed parking meters, in the boot of a car he'd stopped for speeding. He said he was
pleasantly surprised. Woman, 24 years
That sort of thing. Exotic, huh? We live orderly lives here, and there isn't really that much to write about. Anyway, one of the conditions for having the right to write is that we not cause offence. We are an ordered people. My alarm clock rings every morning, at the same time as everyone else's. We are an orderly people. At seven a.m., all over the city, we come shuddering out of sleep, stretching out for silence. When all the bells of all the alarm clocks stop jangling there is a tangible silence which lasts for maybe three minutes, until the sirens start up to rouse us finally and haul us complaining—no, not complaining, because we are tractable people—into the new day. By eight a.m.
we are moving through streets, encased by perspex and steel, travelling into the day. By nine a.m., like most of my fellow citizens, I am in the cube which is my office, preparing for the day. I have kissed my husband goodbye, and patted my pets on their respective heads. I have travelled with my fellow citizens to this cube that is my office.
Offices, like all public spaces, are cuboid, which mirrors the city walls. We are permitted, within reason, to decorate our offices, to differentiate one from another. My office space is delicate. My walls have blurs of colours touching the steel sides, softening the ice. I reach across to switch on my computer, and my dear friend, once my lover, comes up behind and touches my shoulder. He was my dear friend, he was my lover, now he stands warm behind me in this clear crisp cube in which I live, now he sits across from me in the staff room at lunch.
Enough. Remember how Yeats said things fall apart? He was wrong. They just get re-arranged. Changed. I've paid my dues for that affair. Intimate
IfJ
relationships are computer-generated these days. It's for all our good.
Disobedience doesn't attract punishment, but a gentle management of the situation. We are managed—we manage ourselves, this huge population in this limited space—by concensus and by shame. I consented to move out of the city centre for long enough to get over him, and went to live with my sister, who due to her refusal to consent, and her inability to be shamed, has been located permanently on the lower edges of the city, down among the strips of old soil that remain here and there.
It is the old part of the city; well, not the old part as such, since it's all one period, but this part of the old world that was more or less contained within its jurisdiction. The houses here are built of pressed cardboard and they collect dust. In the houses around my sister's house are members of an ancient religion who will not live among the rest of the community. I live with my sister for four months, until the therapist ticks the little box that says I can again work beside my old lover without affect, without effect. And while I live there we work in the contaminated soil, looking into the dark sky from time to time, carrying water and a mix of minerals to old plants which have been programmed to brave the permanent night.
The contamination is an ongoing problem. The government measures it constantly, and now and then announces it's under control. But just last week, a family close to the centre of the city read, in an old Reader's Digest, a story about a small town practice, and decided to have a barbeque—an open fire, with food cooked over flame and coal. They built a fire to cook their food, and now the father and the family dog are dead, two children brain-damaged, and the mother catatonic with shock. The mayor spoke to the city. "The public needs to be aware that burning timber is dangerous," he said.
When we are inside, my sister and I, we sit beside the wide cold windows and watch the neighbours as they come and go. They are believers who no longer know why they believe, but can't imagine any alternatives. They move sullenly beyond the borders of our home. They never meet our eyes, although we wave and call. The women are invisible, hidden under scrolls of black, their eyes downcast. The men are small and tight in Aran jumpers and their wheelbarrows are loaded with loam as they eke out uncontaminated food from the hungry soil.
Outside is always so cold. That's because we lost the sun, centuries ago. You thought humanity couldn't survive without it, didn't you? But it drifted off into a new orbit slowly, over three centuries, and we've managed after all, in our tightly sealed pristine cubes of ordered life, taking extra Vitamin D and spending obligatory minutes under the sun lamps in the government- sponsored gyms. We were used to it. We didn't even miss it. Until three weeks
Lir%JQ
ago, when it returned unexpectedly, unforetold. Oh, it's so pretty. You wouldn't believe how lovely it seems, how warm.
Stolen story #3
Today I saw the sun. I pressed my face against the city wall, and saw the sun. It was red gold, and it moved very, very slowly, always going up. Woman, 31 years For twelve days the sun rose each morning, and set each night. It was like the end of a bad spell. The citizens of the city woke daily at about five thirty a.m., way ahead of the city clocks, and stumbled outside to gaze at the sky. Babies were placed outside, children told, "Look! Look!" It was like yesterday had come home, like the familiar had returned to unsettle today. It was all we'd yearned for, all come at once, it was wishes risen softly to bake in the surprisingly sudden sun. Every afternoon for those twelve days the sun dropped suddenly out of the light, much faster than the ancient stories suggested, and the silence and the dark reminded us daily to forget. Now it's gone again, and we are back in the darkness and artificial light. Was it something we said? I stand outside in the light of the street lamps, which cast regular shadows about their bases.
There are four shadows of me, spread precisely like a compass across the creamy pavement. Each one points in a different direction—north, south, east, west. Which way?
Enough. It's still here and now, and I don't think that future's going to work.
Fantasies never do. Meantime, here I stay in my little airless flat, times alone in my sweaty skin, I writhe in sleeplessness night after night. Tonight I couldn't get comfortable, couldn't stop my skin from twitching and whining, and finally I went through to the lounge and turned on the TV. Now I'm lying there sprawled irritably in front of the fan, and the air it blows across me is still alarmingly hot, but on my damp skin gradually cools me all the same, and the blood bubbling, boiling up behind my red-rimmed eyes, settling to a simmer and then a gentle hum, swish, swish, round and round and round. On TV is an old British film, with old British values. On the film are flecks of snow, and the actors wear greatcoats and hats and if I watch long enough my own rhythms will slow to those more ordered, more leisured ways—I've always been empathic—and my skin will shiver into the cool grey on the screen as the cool clipped voices wash incomprehensibly over and around and through me, and I'll fall, at last, asleep.