Burning Down George Orwell's House

II

It must have been autumn the first time Ray ran away from home. The corn had been harvested — he remembered that much — and only the broken shoots remained. It was field mouse season, when the fleet of combine harvesters would send the critters into the house for shelter. The peanut-buttered traps snapped as soon as his mother could reset them. Ray had had no motivation for leaving other than curiosity. He could already sense that so many things existed beyond his limited understanding and wanted to see what else was out there and then what was beyond that. He needed to know everything that the world contained. His sister turned her back for a moment, and he escaped into a wasteland of clear-cut prairie that extended a hundred million miles in every direction.

The newfound expansiveness of the land created a seismic reconfiguring of his four-year-old self. The cornstalks chopped at his bare feet. The dust and debris of the fields filled his nose. He kept walking, but not necessarily away from anything.

At that time, the Welter farm occupied seventy acres, which Ray Senior had dedicated to the planting of soybeans and feed corn. Even as the nation’s thirst for ethanol fuel grew, the family business was already becoming less viable. Every day, construction trucks ferried particleboard and faux-stone panels to the new housing developments at the remotest reaches of the property, which his dad had been forced to sell off piecemeal. That was where Ray headed, toward the clamor of hammering and sawing and engine noise.

After an hour, he arrived in a vast new kingdom where dozens of steamrollers and cement mixers, backhoes and dump trucks had gathered around the plywood skeletons of the new subdivision castles. The sound was wondrous: a gas-powered symphony of sonic textures and tone colors. Then it all stopped. There was some commotion, and a man in a hardhat lifted Ray into a pickup and drove him back to the house. The ride took two minutes. He had been so close to home the entire time. The stranger carried him under his arm like a sack of feed corn, ascended the porch, and knocked on the door. Ray’s mother answered.

He didn’t understand the conversation but understood all too well the worry he had caused. His father would hear about this. He was thrown into the tub, from where he heard his mother hollering at poor Becky because of his transgression.

Not long after that, seventy acres became forty and then later twenty. The civilized world metastasized onto the fragrant fields that had been his personal playground. Ray and his new neighborhood friends rode their dirt bikes for hours, pissed on passing freight trains, set up their own hobo camp under the interstate. The houses and cars and people continued to encroach upon his childhood home until only a few acres remained and Ray’s father fired his last workers and took a job at the factory two towns over.

Ray, a few years later, got accepted into the big land-grant university further downstate and it was during the second semester of freshman year that he first read Nineteen Eighty-Four. He picked it up for the first time while eating lunch, and it had grown dark by the time he finished the appendix. The book came as a revelation.

Orwell had predicted everything. It was uncanny. His invention of Big Brother had come to fruition in the form of a vast network of conjoined consumers and Ray now understood that he was one of them. How many times had he caught himself wandering through the mall and spending money as a form of entertainment? He surfed the web and purchased things he didn’t need in order to distract himself for a few moments from all the bad shit on the evening news. He had been marketed to so constantly and so effectively that he stopped noticing it — until he read Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell had revealed how the world really operated. Winston Smith’s ordeal at the hands of the totalitarian state stayed with Ray for weeks; he couldn’t stop thinking about that terror and about how he might live his own life without becoming equally enslaved by the system. That was when he declared a major in advertising, where his talent for invention — or his “genial wise-assery,” as his father called it — could be put to lucrative use. The decision was more than financial, however. Ray knew that some key to his self-preservation sat hidden among the now dog-eared pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The book’s pseudo-academic appendix “The Principles of Newspeak” served as a detailed linguistic analysis of Big Brother’s state-mandated language. By changing the official language to Newspeak, the government of Oceania sought to eliminate unnecessary and redundant words, to make the citizens’ vocabulary smaller in order to limit what kinds of thoughts were even possible. The people couldn’t revolt if they couldn’t even conceive of the word revolution. Ray wanted to apply the same concept to advertising. Consumers didn’t really want to make choices — they wanted the illusion of choice. By changing the way people thought, he could also alter their behavior, especially their spending habits. It sounded so easy, and it was.

A career in advertising would also allow Ray to escape the growing claustrophobia of small-town life for good. Living away from home in the dorms had rekindled his childhood curiosity. The world intimidated him with its vastness, but he still needed to see all of it. Every inch.

UPON GRADUATION HE MOVED to Chicago and in the fall he started his paid internship with the ad agency Logos. The company was known worldwide — it had been responsible for some of the biggest campaigns in recent advertising history. They had popularized Japanese cars in the American-manufacturing Midwest and convinced vast swaths of the electorate to vote against their own best interests in a presidential election. They had proved that choosing one brand of shitty cola over another was a statement of personal identity. He read articles and highlighted the important info, which he then converted into bullet points. The work was tedious, but easy.

He lived in an otherwise Bosnian enclave on the far North Side. The local community center brought in a wild Balkan orchestra from time to time, and Ray learned how to dance the kolo, albeit with some moves of his own invention mixed in. After he had spent another weekend drinking too much and making out with any number of Yugoslavian girls with lots of j’s and z’s in their names who pretended not to understand his English, he crawled back into his cubicle one Monday morning to find an email summoning him to his manager’s office. Someone in the elevator had no doubt smelled the homemade rakija still seeping from his pores and dimed him out. Was he still drunk? It was certainly possible. His clothes reeked.

His boss Theodore “Bud” Jackson was one of six executive vice presidents. Ray had gone out drinking with him a few times at a dive where a former Miss Ukraine tended bar. They watched her wash beer glasses for hours and that was far more entertaining than another stupid ballgame on TV. Bud’s career had been a tumultuous one. He had started out as a specialist on mail-order marketing and on his way up the corporate scaffold impregnated an entry-level data enterer who returned to her native Korea. Once a year she mailed him a portrait of his daughter, who he had never met in person. She had to be nine or ten already.

The US consumer market’s evolution from analog to digital technologies had required Bud, like everyone else, to diversify his skill set. By age forty, he had become an early adopter of every new technology and helped Logos transition from a traditional ad house into a “creative communications company.” Under Bud’s watch, advertising had become a bad word. Logos didn’t have clients, it established strategic partnerships; it didn’t make commercials, it created market-driven branding solutions. It was all very Orwellian — he and Ray thought a lot alike. Along the way, Bud also transformed himself into the industry’s foremost snack-food guru. Every obese child in America who reached for a second fistful of chips did so in large part because of Bud’s tireless efforts. He was losing a loud argument with the operating system of his computer when Ray poked his head in.

Ray’s probationary internship period had apparently come to an end. Bud offered him a permanent and full time position, which he accepted without negotiation. The salary was an abstraction. At twenty-four years old he would make more money than his father did down at the plant — and without the daily exposure to known carcinogens. That afternoon, he moved from his cubicle into a slightly larger one.

The work turned out to be far less exciting than he had envisioned. He spent months at a time rewriting the same two or three concepts for the same two or three small partners. A half-trained monkey could have done his job, but he kept his head down and churned out copy. Sometimes after work he would hit the bars with some coworkers or go on the occasional date and bring a girl home to make sweat angels in the bed sheets.

To keep himself intellectually stimulated at work, Ray taught himself new graphic design and web development languages. He played with open-source CGI programs like they were real-time strategy video games; from his cubicle, after hours, he built parody sites for real companies that were more effective and easier to use than their official sites. After that, he created a Big Brotheresque widget that could scan ten thousand status updates — chosen according to specific user demographics — and aggregate their keywords into a randomly generated ad for a product that did not exist, but which 0.78 percent of those people attempted to purchase. He received so many orders for a flowerpot full of dried elephant dung that he considered finding a company to produce them.

Sometimes he would attempt to pitch his concepts to Bud and the others, but most of the time he kept his mouth shut and received an annual 5 percent raise for his efforts. After a few years he had saved enough money to finagle a sub-prime mortgage on a small condo he couldn’t really afford, but which offered an obscured view of Lake Michigan. He hated to leave the pretty Yugoslav girls behind, but it was an easy move otherwise. Everything he owned fit into his car — by far the shittiest one in his new building’s underground lot — and it just took one trip downtown. The only decor was a framed black-light propaganda poster in the living room. It featured a man’s white face and the words BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

AT THE COMPANY’S ANNUAL Winter Holiday Fiesta, during one of his many sallies for a drink, Ray bumped into some unfortunate woman so hard that she spilled her wine. The red shower floated airborne for an eternity before finding a place to settle amid her décolletage. He wiped at it with a napkin before realizing that he was feeling up a stranger — a stranger he had just doused in her own pinot noir. A nebula of stains darkened the front of her dress. She looked at Ray, her mouth agape, then looked down at her ruined clothes. They appeared to be expensive. The extent of the tragedy made itself apparent, and she pulled her shawl around herself. Her lips pursed into a slow smile and she laughed once, very loudly, and then threw her remaining wine at him. The stain didn’t register on his holiday sweater, so she took another glass from the table and tried again. The splash caught him dead in the face. His eyes stung. He cried red tears that he tried to blot with a sleeve. The woman — a few years older than him and lovely despite the hideous stain — was laughing so hard she had to cram her shawl into her mouth. Neither of them could contain their laughter.

“I’m Ray,” he said.

“Helen.”

“Do you work here, Helen?”

“No, I came with one of your colleagues, but she seems to have disappeared.”

“I want to show you something.”

They shared a bottle of scotch on the roof and watched the falling snow, then warmed each other up in a cubicle over in Billing. She was an English professor at Chicago’s most prestigious public university. Her PhD dissertation, as Ray understood it, had reevaluated Romantic-era conceptions of feminine identity and tied them to poetry’s apparent origins in ancient mythology and goddess worship. Something like that. She recited from memory “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and by the time she got to:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope

Ray recognized something in himself that he could only think of as love. When, her stained party dress half-zipped and her underpants missing in action, she breathed

To blow against thee: and, in after years,

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms

he knew that he wanted to marry her. She moved in a few days later.

Originally from the Virginia side of the Washington, DC, suburbs, Helen Bedford was the warmest, most viscerally kindhearted woman Ray had ever met. She was also the smartest person who had ever been nice to him. Being close to her felt good. She had maintained the lithe figure of her days as a competitive tennis player, but the angles of her face and shoulders and hips had softened ever so slightly over the years. She kept her hair cut short to better show off the premature but, she had said, well-earned grey strands. Ray never wanted to stop looking at her.

Every night after work during the following week Ray drove up to her place in Evanston to help her box all her books up. Her teacups and their attendant saucers matched the plates and bowls and serving dishes. The set had been in her family for two generations. She owned a gravy boat. The two of them sat on her living room floor and wrapped each piece in a pillow of bubble wrap and packing tape. Helen was absolutely gorgeous, but didn’t seem to be aware of it. Ray couldn’t keep his hands off her. “Stop it — I’m filthy,” she said and pulled him to the rug by his belt. He kissed every curve, every plane, every follicle he could find on her body, and he could find them all. The plastic sheets beneath them went pop pop pop pop.

They got married the following summer in a small service down at the parish his parents and sister belonged to and Ray had to pretend that the mass was something other than a bald-faced farce masked in medieval superstition. Helen’s family flew in to the nearest airport and took over an entire floor of a chain hotel next to the interstate. One of her wedding presents for him was a first edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four ordered from a bookseller in London. The gift was made even more remarkable by the fact that she had been secreting away small amounts of money — twenty dollars here, fifty there — since the week they met. Instead of a honeymoon, the happy couple stayed put in Chicago. Ray used some vacation days from Logos and they spent a week building forts out of sofa cushions and watching The Red Shoes and I Know Where I’m Going!

In the fall, she became the acting chair of the Department of English, where she filled in for a sick colleague. Her new responsibilities often kept her at campus late into the night. She also taught two classes, which involved a great deal of preparation and grading, and sat on a number of different departmental committees. With more time on his hands, Ray sometimes went out drinking with Bud, but he also spent more late nights at the office. That was when he began to tinker in secret on the concept that would define his career in advertising.

His project was, at the beginning, nothing more than a mental exercise, a distraction undertaken for the sake of curiosity and to avoid puttering around the condo and waiting for Helen to get home. Some people played video games or watched sports; Ray invented a new platform from which a company like Logos could interface with its strategic partners and their would-be customers. He sought to utilize the Orwellian nature of social media and invent a profitable new method of corporation-consumer interactivity.

He decided on vandalism.

A TRULY MONUMENTAL ADVERTISING campaign could be a work of public performance art, one that could make an ungodly profit if the advertisers learned to put — or learned to pretend to put — the once-private desires of the proles (that was, the consumers) ahead of those of Big Brother (the corporate overlords who hired them). Ray wanted to exploit the proles’ false sense of freedom; he would reach out to consumers’ greatest aspirational self-images confident in knowing that people purchased things not for who they were but for who they wanted to be.

The idea behind his secret campaign wasn’t all that complicated. Contemporary consumers believed that they wanted to be free of corporate manipulation and free of subservience to Big Brother. The average American consumer spent enormous amounts of money in the effort to appear anticonsumerist. Ray had done the same thing for years.

As an experiment, he crafted an anticorporate message and campaign for a real American corporation. Just for laughs, he chose a particular model of military-grade SUV that had been introduced to the public marketplace a decade prior. After the initial novelty had worn off the sales figures plummeted due to a combination of abysmal gas mileage and skyrocketing petroleum costs. Out of boredom, Ray devised the method that would — on paper — make those trucks the most desirable vehicles on the road even amid a global oil crisis and during an era dedicated to environmental sustainability. It was meant to be theoretical.

As the intellectual property of Logos, his project didn’t belong to him. He kept it a secret up until the day that Bud sent a company-wide email announcing that they had formed a strategic partnership with the very same manufacturer of the very same military-grade SUVs. Ray read the email three times: Bud would soon begin building a team to interface with the automaker and better enable it to reposition its brand image amid a global marketplace advancing toward greater ecological awareness. Ray leapt from his cubicle.

Being named the account director for a domestic SUV company was a logical step in Bud’s career. He had a cell phone pinched between his face and shoulder while he pecked at a keyboard. “Two fifty a barrel,” he told the caller. “Yeah … I don’t know … Either the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Mexico, I forget which — same difference … Our projections have it at three hundred by the end of the decade … Yes, this decade. That’s why the small part of Detroit that isn’t already boarded up is shitting itself right now. For our purposes, more expensive is better.”

Ray tiptoed in. Every footstep required concentration. Bud lifted his chin at him as if to say, What do you want? Ray thought about turning around and walking out. He could forget about his efforts to sell a shitload of SUVs and go back to hiding in his cubicle and spend the rest of his life rewriting the same three goddamn advertisements … or he could find out if his theories would work in real life. He handed Bud an unlabeled DVD.

“Jürgen, I’m telling you we’ll take care of it,” Bud told the telephone. “You won’t regret it … Yes … Yes.” He cupped his palm over the receiver. “What is this? I don’t have time for games, Man Ray.”

Ray slid the disc into one of the computers on his desk and the TV monitors on the wall went blank. The sound of a truck engine filled the room. A speck appeared at a distant horizon on both screens. The image grew larger until it became one of the SUVs that Logos was now partnered with. The truck, its engine roaring with thirst, sped toward the camera as if to mow the viewer down, then it skidded to a halt and filled the screen. A vandal had carved two words into the door as if with a key: “SUV Hogg.”

“Let me call you back,” Bud said. He sent his phone skidding across the papers on his desk. “What the fuck is this?”

“It’s our campaign.”

“Close the door. We don’t do campaigns, Ray. We establish strategic partnerships and provide market-driven solutions.”

“It’s our new strategic partnership. Scroll over the truck. It’s all there.” Words popped out from the hood, from the roof and trunk, from the tires. Clicking on them led to page after page about the proud tradition of petroleum production in American history. It was all very patriotic. Bud’s cell phone rang but he ignored it. Ray had earned himself two minutes to make his pitch. “The environment-friendly angle is a mistake,” he said.

Bud looked baffled. “A mistake? The contract it took me nine fucking months to procure is a mistake?” His landline rang. He answered both phones and placed them next to each other on the desk so the callers could talk to each other.

“Nothing we do,” Ray said, “will convince women or hippies to buy these trucks. Look at where the market’s headed. We need to help the automaker reassess the brand’s goals and attack a core audience. Men who buy SUVs don’t care about the environment or else they wouldn’t buy SUVs in the first place. My campaign — sorry, my market-driven solution — is about defiance.”

“Defiance.”

“Screw the environment.”

“Screw the environment? That’s your idea? How long have you been working on this?”

“You’re always preaching about interactivity. What’s more interactive than vandalizing your own truck?”

Bud hung up the two phones. “How did you know we’d get this account?”

“I didn’t.”

“So you spent, what, a month putting this together? Even if it was on your own time, you do understand that it’s the exact fucksticking opposite of the direction I agreed upon with the client?”

“Give them the DVD. I have a whole platform developed. You’ve said it yourself that the thirty-second ad is dead, right? So we’ll go post-media with this. We’ll go post-post media. I’ll put it this way: when’s the last time you took the L and someone wasn’t having a loud personal conversation on his cell phone? Everyone hates that guy, right? But what I have in mind will use the disintegration of public and private space to our advantage. We’re going to get twenty of these things—”

“Twenty of what?”

“These SUVs. We get as many as we can and vandalize them.”

“Vandalize them?”

“Yes.”

“To say ‘SUV Hog’?”

“Two g’s. We’ll copyright it immediately.”

“Are you fucking retarded?”

“Every couple weeks we’ll scrape ‘SUV Hogg’ into a truck and park it at that week’s hot place. Or outside a stadium before a playoff game.”

“You’re suggesting that people will buy SUVs because they’re getting keyed? Do you appreciate how stupid you sound?”

“It will work.”

“No offense, but you’re a fucking asshole.”

“Think about it for a sec. People will notice that all these trucks are getting vandalized, right? We’ll make it look like an organized grassroots effort by some smelly activists and it will get covered on every blog in the city. Think of the buzz,” Ray said. He was getting worked up. “Once some imaginary granola-eating pinkos get blamed, buying one of these things will become an act of defiance. Real men are free to waste as much fossil fuel as they want without big government or some hippies telling them what to do.”

“Screw the environment?”

“It’s a matter of synchronizing the doublespeak message with the new media at our disposal. We can even arrange it ahead of time for the dealerships to provide free paint touch-ups if the truck owners want them — which they won’t.”

His two minutes expired.

“SUV Hogg. That’s not it exactly, but let me give it some thought. I’ll run it upstairs. Have you shown this to anybody else?”

“No, I—”

“Don’t. You’re a strange motherfucker, Sugar Ray.”

Four days later, stacks of fresh nondisclosure forms landed on every chair in the building. Bud got the board’s permission to name Ray the assistant account director for what would become the Oil Hogg initiative. It was a huge step up in the world. He even got his very own office. At the end of the day Bud and the rest of the team were waiting for him when he arrived downstairs in the parking garage. His car had disappeared from its usual spot. In its place stood a hulking SUV — a bonus for generating the idea. With some ceremony, the CEO herself handed him the keys, which he used to scrape “Oil Hogg” into the paint.

The team kicked the project off by vandalizing the hood or door or rear panel of twenty-four SUVs and then parking them outside Chicago’s most popular restaurants and tourist spots. Over the days that followed, a small cadre of sworn-to-secrecy interns posted grainy camera phone images on every social-media platform. The reaction came instantaneously. Hundreds of people liked and re-posted the images; they crowed with delight about the comeuppance of those arrogant, petroleum-guzzling bullies who clogged the roads with their behemoth machines.

No one expected the copycat vandalism that followed. Through the winter, the defacement of SUVs took on its own momentum when students, housewives, and everyday proles got in on the action and started scraping up strangers’ vehicles. A wave of low-stakes eco-terrorism washed over Chicago and unwittingly spread the Oil Hogg branding message.

Then Ray’s plan began in earnest. He had the interns launch the counter-initiative. They started on AM radio, calling in to right-wing talk shows to say how proud they were of being decent, law-abiding Americans and hence free to despoil the environment any way they damn well pleased. “Longtime listener, first time caller,” an intern said live on the air from Bud’s office. “I’m proud to be an Oil Hogg.”

Supporters called in to echo his sentiments. The new narrative took shape online and on the airwaves, one extolling the red-meat joy of driving big trucks. The rhetoric of the new blogs and memes equated gasoline usage with being a real American. Hundreds of SUV owners whose vehicles had not been vandalized soon did it themselves. Sales boomed citywide and in the northern half of the state. The auto dealers couldn’t keep them on the lot. The earnings reports erased any doubt on the part of the Logos board about Ray’s unconventional methods.

The fun couldn’t last, however. Someone — most likely an intern — wrote an anonymous, tell-all blog post. Chicago’s free weekly ran a cover story about car dealerships promoting fake grassroots environmentalist vandalism as a way to market more trucks, and that led to a local news segment in which a trench-coated correspondent stood in front of the Logos office and scratched the Greek letters of the company sign with a key.

There were lawsuits and counter-suits, governmental fines and complaints from a union claiming to represent automobile detailers. The Justice Department was snooping around. To avoid litigation from the truck buyers stupid enough to key their own goddamn vehicles, the manufacturer confessed to the shenanigans and offered to pay for all the paint touch-ups.

The Logos Print Team designed full-page mea culpa advertisements for the region’s largest remaining newspapers. The final leg of the campaign featured fat actors portraying stereotypical pinstriped, cigar-chomping auto executives from Detroit getting busted for vandalizing their own trucks. Their buffoonish antics were detailed in an array of short advertorial webisodes, gamified apps, and social-network widgets. Protestors on both sides of the debate loved the images of fat, rich people getting marched off to jail.

One of the interns, a young woman named Flora, repurposed some Oil Hogg print ads for a series of street-art stencils and used them to deface half of the abandoned buildings in downtown Chicago. Her vandalism wasn’t officially approved by Logos, but it wasn’t condemned either. She garnered a great deal of attention around the office and did brilliant work despite her moral objections. In a company-wide email, she had called Ray’s new step in the Oil Hogg initiative “morally reprehensible” and “pure concentrated evil, but ingenious.” Ray saved the email.

By making fun of themselves, the SUV manufacturers turned the scandal into victory and the advertising awards poured in. Local sales records were shattered as consumers rallied around the brand. It was rumored that a Chinese conglomerate wanted to import the SUVs and was petitioning the US government for some revisions to an international trade agreement. In the fiscal quarter that followed, the SUV out-performed hybrids three to one in the greater Chicago market. Dealers presold the trucks months in advance of their production and they continued to get vandalized as fast as they could escape the Michigan assembly lines. More shifts were added at the factories and the creation of so many new jobs led to significant press coverage about the pending renewal of Detroit — and it was all thanks to him.

RAY WAS IN HIS office when the factory down near his hometown exploded. His mother called him. “The plant’s gone,” she said and hung up. He remained at his computer and refreshed a browser window to follow what little news and gossip the downstate TV affiliates and social media users could piece together. The number of reported fatalities climbed all morning. Even before the call from Becky he knew that his father was dead.

The town became a chemical hot zone. Forty-six neighbors and friends were gone as well. Ray stayed in Chicago and managed his mother’s medical care from afar, safe from the toxic smog that would soon express itself in every variety of physiological anomaly. He refused to expose himself to the poisonous cloud that mushroomed over his hometown. A boil-water advisory remained in effect for eight weeks, in a twenty-five-mile radius, while the death toll crept higher. Thousands of acres of crops had to be destroyed. Corn too toxic to be fed even to animals was sold for ethanol, where in the bellies of sedans and SUVs it gained an even greater toxicity; it was exhaust-piped into the atmosphere and dispersed across the entire Midwest.

Helen did everything in her power to console him, but Ray spent his days in a trance of rage and denial. He trudged from the condo to the office, and from the office back to the condo. He didn’t bother going home some evenings and that didn’t sit very well with her, but he felt better when he was safely bunkered down at work. The tedium of spreadsheets and oil price forecasts, the microtrends of American consumer spending habits, distracted Ray from his own inner life. He felt his thought processes growing jumbled and spaghetti-like. Something unfixable had snapped inside him and the awareness of it made it worse.

With nothing to bury, he felt no compulsion to attend the funeral mass. Becky and her husband soon moved in with their mother and — coincidence maybe — they were unable to conceive a child. He had become the last male Welter. The survival or cessation of the entire family name now rested with him. That was the kind of grown-up burden he had spent his entire life not thinking about.

That he stayed at his desk through personal tragedy brought him to the attention of the Logos corporate honchos, but what the board took for stoic dedication to the craft of strategic branding, Ray knew to be abject fear: of facing his father’s absence, of his mother’s heartbreak, and of the carcinogens in her water, of the distance he felt expanding between himself and his own good nature. He tried not to let his intense grief affect Helen, but from the look on her face while she slept he could tell that he was failing. He had snapped at her a few times, but had never known why. She continued to do everything in her power to help him march through each day.

The employees who had survived the explosion were offered and accepted work as day laborers, digging holes and filling them again until out-of-state demolition engineers arrived to peel acres of contaminated topsoil from what had been among the earth’s most fertile farmland, ground that now contained Ray’s cracked genetic code in the form of his father’s smithereens. The crew cemented over the accident site while every regulatory oversight organization dragged its feet, which were snared in red tape and a hundred-mile-long fence of glazed razor wire.

The aftermath was even worse: bright yellow lines painted upon the site to delineate countless parking spaces surrounding a mecca of convenient, one-stop shopping where his mother now bought aseasonal produce and the disposable electronics Big Brother used to track her movements and convince her to buy even more junk. Becky implored Ray to visit, but he just couldn’t. He had his own problems. For the first time in his life, Ray felt something less than indestructible.

Around that time, Ray also started to have some serious reservations about the whole Oil Hogg endeavor. He kept Flora’s email in his inbox, where he looked at it every time he powered on a computer or his phone. His depression grew in direct proportion to the sales figures. When he could no longer avoid the practical realities behind his success, he took to drinking more scotch. What he had done was morally reprehensible.

Helen urged him to quit and Ray considered it, but he simply couldn’t justify doing so. The money was too good; there was no way he could give those paychecks up. He could imagine what his father would have said. His old man would have been disgusted by the very thought of his only son and heir leaving a high paying job in order to save a few trees. It was unthinkable.

Whether the domestic strife resulted from his growing disillusionment with Logos or vice versa, he couldn’t say. Helen still sometimes managed to soothe Ray’s anxiety attacks with carefully chosen lines of verse, with CDs of Satie and Chopin, but she grew frustrated with his despondency and rededicated herself to her research, to her tenure portfolio, to the students she conferenced with from a treadmill at the campus rec center.

If she was asleep when he got home he would pour a glass of scotch or three to unwind on the balcony. The weather didn’t matter. Late at night, Lake Michigan looked like … like nothing. It was an enormous, black expanse and it reminded him that he lived every day at the very end of the world. A short boat ride and he could fall off the edge of the earth, down down down down down through the limitless oblivion of the cosmos, and that comforted him. He wouldn’t see his wife for days at a time.

During a particularly vindictive quarrel, Ray used a few words that once spoken aloud could never be revoked. She asked him to move out and for the first time in months there was no reason to argue with her. The next day, he leased a corner apartment on the fifteenth floor of a gutted and renovated 1927 high-rise pictured in every architectural guide to Chicago. The deposit and first month’s rent paid for the illusion of antiquity; behind the ornate, brick superstructure a network of coaxial cables and wireless receptors provided every manner of computerized and televisionary convenience. The place did not include a parking spot, however, so he left his SUV at the condo and for the next several months he was glad to not have to look at it.

HELEN CALLED VERY EARLY one Saturday morning, which was a bit odd. She didn’t leave a message. The coffee-maker had shut itself off and Ray poured a tepid cup. Bud had also sent a series of texts overnight imploring him out for an afternoon of beer and circus. There would be an important hockey game on TV, but Ray wasn’t much of a sports fan. He caught his reflection in the door of the refrigerator while reaching for the half and half: he needed a haircut and his face couldn’t decide if it was growing a beard or not. Don’t you own a razor? his dad would have asked, joking but not really joking.

She picked up after the first ring. “It’s me,” Ray said.

“I know,” Helen said. “Your name comes up on the screen.”

Good morning to you too. “What’s going on?”

There was some variety of crazy, avant-garde singing in the background. It sounded like an argument among three opera singers.

“I need you to come get your SUV. It’s an eyesore. I want it out of here.”

“We haven’t spoken in, what, three weeks and you call me at seven A.M. to talk about my truck?”

“Listen, would you please get rid of it?”

The singers shouted and chirped and barked. They might have had a broken harpsichord or piano and some kind of rusted horn accompanying them.

“What am I supposed to do, park it on the street?”

“That’s not my problem.”

It wasn’t like Helen to pick a fight for no reason. Everything had become subtext with her. Something was up her ass, but it wasn’t the truck. “What’s gotten into you?”

“It’s just that … Listen, let’s just forget it.”

“What is this about, Helen? Do you want me to come over? I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“No! … No, I shouldn’t have called. I sent you an email,” she said and hung up.

He dumped the coffee onto the dishes piled in the sink and listened to a message from Flora. “Hi, Ray?” Her voice cheered him up. When her internship ended, Flora had, with some reluctance, agreed to accept a permanent position.

Bud had once admitted that his frequent fantasies about Flora involved them running away together to a Hawaiian island and taking with them a lifetime supply of tequila and birth-control pills. Ray thought she was attractive, yes, but that was due more to her considerable intellect than the perfect round butt that Bud wanted to “eat an Italian beef sandwich off of.”

“In retrospect,” she had told his voice mail, “I was wrong about something I wrote in the market summary I turned in today. I looked at the reports again and they make a lot more sense now. I hope it’s okay if I email you some revisions, because I already did. If you prefer I can get you hard copies this weekend. Let me know, okay? Okay. Bye!”

He switched his laptop on and deleted the spam that had accumulated overnight. He and Helen had taken to communicating almost exclusively via email. The situation was ridiculous, but for the short term it was best to abide by her wishes. Her use of his full name and the salutatory colon indicated the things that this email would not be: personal, apologetic, salubrious, tender, forgiving, decent. She wanted him to come to her office for an appointment and proposed a meeting time.

An appointment? He now needed a goddamn appointment to see his wife?

He texted Bud back:

SEE YOU THERE.

He opened the dishwasher, removed all the glassware that had sat in there so long that it had become dirty again, and then calculated the dishes’ best possible arrangement within the limited and awkwardly arranged rack space. Nothing seemed to fit right. Every angle was terrible. Next, he filled three garbage bags with pizza boxes and beer bottles and carried them down the hall to the chute like a derelict Santa Claus preparing to dump them in some bad girl’s chimney. They landed fifteen stories below with a crash of broken glass. He pulled the sheets off the bed and stuffed them in a mesh Kletzski’s Kleaners laundry sack and did the same with all the stray clothes.

While scanning the news, he spooned a bowl of cold cereal into his mouth. Every day another columnist or editorial writer made another superficial reference to George Orwell: Big Brother-this and thoughtcrime-that. Orwell hadn’t only predicted the current state of affairs, he had also provided innumerable journalists with a series of metaphors vague enough to pass as zodiac horoscopes.

CANCER (June 21–July 22) Constant surveillance by the state will undermine your autonomy as a free-thinking individual. Think for yourself and don’t be a copycat. Wear something red today.

Orwell was everywhere.

Ray pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, then tore a white Oxford out of the dry cleaner’s sterile plastic. He owned dozens of similar shirts, each with a different pattern of stains and amount of fraying at the collar. The oldest of them was little more than a rag tied to a wire hanger; it was his favorite shirt. Each Christmas, Easter, and birthday another identical one arrived in the mail courtesy of his mother. She had always been a creature of habit, but after the explosion had progressed toward the genuinely eccentric. Dementia had entered the picture. Exchanging three items every year was easier than attempting to explain to her yet again that he had put on a few pounds over the past fifteen years. It was nice that she still recognized his voice on the phone, but that was just a matter of time.

To get to the dry cleaner’s Ray had to face the weekend crowd of bad-art browsers and fake-fur-wearing nannies who zoomed their strollers down the sidewalk like they were racing chariots around ancient Sparta. Off-duty cubicle farmers jostled for sidewalk space with panhandlers and homeless war veterans and proud new parents bubbling over with moneyed angst. The gelato stand and microbrewery crowds spilled onto the sidewalks. Exclusive downtown galleries had opened local branches and brought with them chain coffee shops and national retailers of sweatshop-made clothing. It was all so depressing. He joined in the march-step choreography of the herd and carried his laundry through the crowds and to the mostly blind Polish lady down the street.

The ten-minute walk took him through an area that a decade earlier had tipped over to full-blown gentrification. During the last half century the neighborhood had mutated from a bohunk ghetto cut off from Chicago’s downtown by the river’s Main Branch into a post — GI Bill slum then into a Reagan Renaissance yuppie heaven of renovated row homes and chain boutiques selling mass-produced expressions of individuality. Considering that he had also contributed to the forced displacement and resettlement of the natives, Ray knew he was in no position to complain about the neighborhood colonialism. The local artistic scene had deteriorated after the painters and sculptors had been priced out of their studios by those, like himself, able and willing to pay exorbitant rent for the privilege of living among painters and sculptors.

A construction crew had razed an entire building since he had come home from work last night. A dirt field remained, now adorned with a billboard promising the imminent grand opening of another organic-foods franchise. He couldn’t recall what establishment had occupied the space just fourteen hours earlier. Life continued on. Someone had keyed the words “Oil Hogg” into the hood of an SUV parked in front of a sushi restaurant.

The dry cleaner’s door had a string of brass bells hanging from the inside handle. Mrs. Kletzski’s portable black-and-white TV was cranked up to its maximum, distorted volume.

“Raymond, where have you been hiding?”

“Hello, Mrs. Kletzski. How are you?”

“I’ve had some of your shirts ready for six weeks!”

“Right — I completely forgot about those.”

“I’m not responsible for garments left over six weeks!”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Do you have your ticket?”

“No, Mrs. Kletzski. I never have my ticket, remember?”

“You never have your ticket! Let me see if I can find your slip.”

He never saw other customers in the place, yet behind Mrs. Kletzski hung a serpentine of plastic-sheathed clothes. He wanted to go back there one day, maybe hide from the world for a few hours. There was definitely something wrong with him. He was thirty-three years old and wanted to do nothing more than play amid other people’s cleaned clothes.

“Welter! Eighteen dollars and twelve cents.”

Mrs. Kletzski’s pricing obeyed no specific logic. Identical loads could vary by as much as twenty dollars. He gave her a credit card. “I’m not going home right now. Can I leave these with you and get them later?”

“Sign here. This is your copy. I’m not responsible for garments left over six weeks!”

“I’ll get them later today, Mrs. Kletzski, I promise. Just the usual for these.” He lifted the laundry sacks onto the counter.

“What is it?”

“Sheets, towels. Clothes.”

“When do you need them?”

“No rush.”

“Monday?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Kletzski.”

The bells jingled when he left to battle the rollerbladers, meter maids, and surly pre-teens whose experiences of the physical world were limited to tiny display screens. The homeless people carried paper cups of gourmet coffee ringed with extra cardboard so they wouldn’t scald their fingers.

He was supposed to meet Bud at McCrotchety’s, the flagship of what would soon become a national chain of theme bars offering sanitized and smoke-free nostalgia. It was meant to resemble an old-fashioned Chicago day-load dive bar, but the traditional urine-and-burnt-peanut stink was missing, as were any real old-timer drunks, who were forced to huddle in the few real dives that remained. McCrotchety’s harkened back to an era brought to a close by bars like McCrotchety’s.

The bartendress opened a can of beer for Ray before he sat down.

“Thanks, Lily,” he said.

“So has Helen divorced your sorry ass yet?” Bud asked.

“We’re not getting divorced!”

“How long have you been separated?”

“Ten months.”

“When’s the last time you talked to her?”

“In fact, we spoke today. I have an appointment to see her on Wednesday.”

“An appointment? That doesn’t seem strange to you?”

“We’re both very busy.”

“Busy hiring a lawyer to separate you from what’s left of your money.”

“You’re in rare form today. Who’re we playing?”

“Detroit.”

“I hate Detroit.”

“ ‘Hate’ is a very strong word.”

“I’m trying to get into the whole stupid spirit of male bonding and watching sports. Detroit sucks.”

“Like you mean it.”

“Detroit sucks!”

“Almost.”

“Detroit sucks!”

“Never fucking mind.”

“Detroit sucks!”

Lily came back over. “Hey, guys, I need you to watch the language. There are children at the bar.”

“What the fuck are children doing at the bar?”

“I can get by nicely without Detroit.”

“Better.”

Ray had only drunk one beer and already had to piss. Television screens throughout the bar beckoned to him from every direction; some were hooked up to cable and others to a satellite, and the difference created a time warp in which a slap shot bounced off the goaltender’s chest protector and then five seconds later did so again on another television. More screens were mounted on the walls above the urinals. He went back to his seat to find Bud conspiring with Lily. She left to help someone else before he could sit.

“Are you aware that you look terrible?”

“You could at least act surprised.”

“Still not sleeping?”

“Not really. I need a vacation.”

“That’s a great idea. Here’s my advice. Since Helen’s totally about to divorce your ass, you should—”

“Helen is not about to divorce my ass.”

“You’re joking, right? Of course she’s about to divorce you. Everybody can see it except you. Lily can see it. Instead of sitting around whining and waiting for her to take half your money — hell, she already got your condo — you need to start spending it. Take a vacation. Go on a cruise. Get yourself rocked gently to sleep at night knowing you screwed Helen out of the pleasure of screwing you. Speaking of which, while you were in the bathroom Lily asked me what your deal is.”

“No she didn’t.”

“I’m serious.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That you’re gay.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I did, actually, and I got us some whiskies.”

As if summoned, Lily returned with two glasses of scotch.

“I’m not gay,” Ray said.

“Excuse me?”

“Bud said he told you I was gay.”

“He said you were in the middle of a ‘marital schism.’ Is that what you called it? He also said that your wife is about to divorce your mopey ass. Your being gay is news to me. Not that I have any problem with that. Enjoy your whiskies — they’re on me.”

“I’d like to be on her,” Bud said.

Before it occurred to him that perhaps he shouldn’t be drinking hard alcohol in the middle of the day, Ray took a long sip. It tasted like a generic highland, ten or twelve years old. He fished a few ice cubes from a rocks glass and dropped them into his whisky with a tiny splash.

The bar filled up as the game progressed. The sports-star millionaires representing Chicago were in the process of losing to those representing Detroit. When Ray was a kid, the heated Detroit versus Chicago rivalry had reached epic proportions in his imagination. The gruesome fascination he once had for the hockey fights was now derived from the commercial interruptions. Those thirty-second spots were relics of a previous era, a halcyon time when the advertisements remained separate from the entertainment. Now, there were ads painted onto the ice and superimposed over the action on the screen.

The programs were the commercials. The programs had always been the commercials.

“Give me one of those napkins,” Ray said. He took a pen from the bar and tried to calculate the number of barrels of crude oil he was personally responsible for converting into greenhouse gases. He couldn’t do it. The mathematics were beyond him. He drank some more scotch that he did or didn’t order and then woke up the next morning on a bed with no sheets.

The smell of re-reheated coffee arose from a machine programmed to begin brewing at six A.M. and it roused him from another disturbing dream. Action movies of his own subconscious invention still flickered on his mind. Details gelled into focus. A foreign army had occupied his hometown. Some faceless regiment had appeared by rail in steaming sixty-foot-tall locomotive behemoths as streamlined and fearsome as the Italian futurists’ protofascist visions. The entire town had been conquered, the women raped and children forced into slavery. Smoke rose from what had been the church he had attended as a kid and where he and Helen got married.

His dreams were getting worse. The late-night alcohol wasn’t helping, but neither was its occasional absence. A full month of sleep: that was what he needed. A self-induced coma free from his own imagination.

His eardrums pounded hard enough to drive a galley of rowing, half-naked slaves over the horizon of the flat earth. He spent an hour adrift, clinging to the bare mattress for dear life while the coffee burned again.