Desolation Road

29

Seeing for the first time the city of Kershaw, capital of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation, Johnny Stalin could not properly comprehend what he beheld. From the viewpoint of the guardroom of a train rattling through a range of hills the colour of slate and rust, it seemed to him that he saw a cube, black as his closed eyelids, bearing on its topmost edges the words BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION lettered in gold. Still, he could not assign any proportions to the cube, for it stood in a pond of dirty water which robbed it of any sense of perspective. Then he saw the clouds. They were dirty white cumulus clouds, like soiled cotton, gathering together three quarters of the way up the face of the cube. Johnny Stalin spun away from the window and hid away from what he had beheld.

The cube must have been almost three kilometres on a side.

Now the world took on its proper proportions: the hills scabbed with blast furnaces and foundries, the pool that was no pool at all but a great lake in the centre of which stood Kershaw. A dreadful fascination drew him back to the scene outside. The tiny threads that tied the cube to lake shores he now saw to be wide earth causeways, wide enough to carry twin railroad tracks, and what he had thought to be birds swooping around the faces of the cube were helicopters and dirigibles.

The Court of Piepowder rattled onto a causeway. Proud black and gold expresses bulleted past, rocking the train with their pressure waves. In their wake Johnny Stalin received his first close look at the lake. It seemed to be full of oily sludge, bubbling and steaming gently. Patches of chrome yellow and rust red stained the surface, in the far distance an oil geyser spouted black filth and an area of lake the size of a small town exploded into yellow sulphurous boiling flinging cascades of acid mud hundreds of metres in all directions. Not half a kilometre distant from the causeway some enormous waxy pink object lifted out of a froth of polymerized bubbles, a complex thing of spires and lattices like a capsized cathedral, forever crumbling back into dissolution under its own weight.

Johnny Stalin whimpered in fear. He could not comprehend this hellish place. Then he saw what seemed to be a human figure, strangely clothed, walking on the far lake shore. The sight of humanity in the chemical wilderness cheered him. He did not know, much less care, that the figure was that of a Shareholder of the City of Kershaw strolling by the pleasant shores of Syss, the poisoned lake, in elephantine respirator and isolation suit. The lake’s prismatic colors and rainbow sheen, its gushing geysers, eruptions and spontaneous polymer accretions were much prized by the Shareholders of Kershaw: the melancholy air of Sepia Bay, properly filtered through respirator and rebreathed, was most conducive to reflections on love and love lost; Green Bay, rich in copper nitrates, promoted the tranquility of thought and serenity necessary for managerial decision-making; sickly decaying Yellow Bay, redolent of mortality, favourite spot for suicides; Blue Bay pensive, thoughtful; Red Bay, much beloved by junior Executive Levels, aggressive, dynamic. The executives astroll upon the rusty shores saw the return of the Court of Piepowder, saw the strange polymer chemoid raise itself out of the chemical brew and chattered excitedly through their microphones. Such phenomena were considered fortunate, bestowing upon the beholder luck in love, success in business, and good omens. To the traveller arriving in Kershaw they were foretellers of great fortune. Johnny Stalin, locked in the guardsvan for eight days, knew nothing of omens and harbingers. He knew of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation nothing whatsoever. He would soon.

“Shareholder 703286543,” they told him. “Don’t forget it. 703286543.” He should have been hard put to forget it. It was printed on the plastic badge they gave him, on the one-piece paper suit they gave him, on the door of the room they gave him, and it was stamped on every item in the tiny windowless room: the table, the chair, the bed, the lamp, the towels, the soap, the copy of Toward a New Feudalism under the number-stamped pillow: Shareholder 703286543. At corridor roll call every morning the fat woman in the grey paper junior executive suit called out, “Shareholder 703286543” and every morning Johnny Stalin would raise his hand and call out, “Present.” He came just after Shareholder 703286542 and just before Shareholder 703286544 and learned where to stand in the row by number, not face. After the roll call the fat woman would read a short piece from Toward a New Feudalism, deliver a brief homily on the virtues of industrial feudalism, and shout out the day’s production quotas which the Shareholders shouted back while performing forty press-ups, forty knee-bends and jogging on the spot to rather martial music blaring from the loudspeakers. Then they would doff paper caps and hold them over hearts to sing the Company song. As Shift C marched down the corridor to the gravity bus, the fat woman would shout out the state of the Company’s shares in the world markets. It was Company policy for all Shareholders to feel personal satisfaction from their minuscule contribution to the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The fat woman would check Shift C into the gravity bus, Shareholder blah blah blah, Shareholder blah blah blah, Shareholder blah blah blah. The doors would close and the gravity bus would shoot upanddownandforwardandbackwardandleftandright and Shareholder 703286543 would have his shift in ructions of laughter with his impersonation of the fat grey woman going blah blah blah. With a lurch that pushed everyone against everyone else the gravity bus would arrive at its destination, doors would slam open, and the laughter and smiles switch off like late-night radio programmes as Shift C marched into the factory.

There were numbers on the machines too: machine number 703286543 stood on the conveyor between machine 703286542 and machine 703286544. The Shareholders would take up their positions, and when the hooter blew, the hatch at the end of the conveyor would open and components start to come down the serpentine production line. From 0900 to 1100 hours (when there was a break for tea) and from 1115 to 1300 (when it was lunchtime) Shareholder 703286543 took a piece of plastic shaped a bit like a human ear and a piece of plastic shaped like an ornate letter P and heatwelded them together on his bonding machine. From 1330 hours to 1630 hours he would weld some more ears and letter Ps and then Shift C would clock out and march out of the factory to meet Shift A marching in. They would enter the gravity bus once again, there would be more upping and downing and to-ing and fro-ing and then the Shareholders of Shift C would be back in their familiar corridors. There would be a noisy, joking hour-anda-bit in the corridor bath house, then dinner in the refectory (so similar to the factory refectory that Shareholder 703286543 sometimes wondered if they were the same refectory), and after that the comrades of Shift C would go to a bar and run up phenomenal charge accounts buying ridiculous daquiri ices and ludicrous drinks made primarily from pureed mulberries. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they went to the bar. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they went to see a movie or a live show, and on Saturdays they went dancing because the Palais de Danse was the only place they could meet girls. Shareholder 703286543 was a little bit too short and a little bit too young to enjoy the dancing. His teeth came uncomfortably close to nipple height on his dancing partners, but he liked the music, especially the new music by that man Glenn Miller. Buddy Mercx was good too. On Sunday there was the Miracle Mall and in the evening everyone went to the Company relaxarium, where the young Shareholder learned all about Men’s Fun well before his due.

Kid’s too young for this, his comrades said, but they brought him along week in and week out because to have left him out would have broken shift solidarity. Shift solidarity was the guiding light of the production unit’s life. You stuck by your mates or you didn’t stick at all. That was before Johnny Stalin learned the meaning of the tiger-striped suggestion box.

Johnny Stalin learned much in his early months in the corporation. He learned to bow to the manager and pull faces behind his back. He learned to please all men while pleasing himself. He learned the involutions of the pseudo-science called economics and its spurious laws, and he courted its idiot bastard daughter called industrial feudalism. He drank and joked with the boys at night and by day he welded pieces of plastic shaped like ears to pieces of plastic shaped like Ps and passed them on to Shareholder 703286544, who welded them to a piece of plastic shaped like a fat man. The weeks, the months passed drab and featureless as paper tissues pulled from a box until one day, in mid-weld, Johnny Stalin realized that he had no idea where the plastic pieces shaped like P’s, ears and fat men went, or what they formed. For twelve months he had been welding two pieces of plastic together and now he had to know why. Dreaming in his numbered bed at night, plastic mouldings tumbled around him and fused into huge plastic mountains, into plastic cordilleras, into plastic continents, into crushing plastic moons at the heart of which lay a piece of plastic shaped like an ear welded to a piece of plastic shaped like a letter P.

One day, feigning mild diarrhoea, he excused himself from the clockingoff shift and hid in the toilet until the gravity bus had rumbled and clanked away up its slot. Quietly slipping through the swinging doors, he sauntered past the stony silent Shareholders and reached the beginning of the line where the components came through the wall and embarked upon their journey of fusion. He followed the meandering production line, peering over Shareholders’ shoulders as they welded, screwed on knobs, pressed together housings and casings, soldered electronics, and fitted trims. Intent on Company business, most ignored him; to those few who shot him a quizzical glance, 703286543 put on his best managerial expression (perfected through months of practice) and said in a foremanly fashion, “Very good, very good, carry on.” He was beginning to gather what the device was-a combination radio, tea maker, and bedside lamp, a useful enough item to be certain, though he could not see where his plastic ear and letter P made a contribution. At the end of the production line the radioteamakerlamps passed through a slot in the wall and vanished. Beside the conveyor was a door marked Management Only. Johnny Stalin pushed the door open and found himself in a short corridor at the end of which was another door marked Management Only. Beside him the completed radioteamakerlamps moved along the conveyor toward another slot in the wall. Johnny Stalin pushed open the second door marked Management Only and found himself in a room so similar to the one he had left that he thought for a moment that he had taken the wrong door. Then he looked harder and saw that all was utterly different. The radioteamakerlamps appeared out of the wall and passed down a production line where Company Shareholders in paper worksuits and plastic identity badges reduced them to their component parts. A deproduction line, a disassembly line. Numb with surprise, Johnny Stalin found the point on the line where his counterpart placed the plastic ear and letter P under a radio beam and broke the bonds that held them together. The number of that Shareholder was 345682307. At the end of the line, down by position 215682307, a stream of plastic and chrome components passed through a slot in the wall beside which was a door marked Management Only.

That night, while drinking fizzes in the bar, Shareholder 703286543 wrote on a small slip of paper:

“In the interests of merchantable-product per labour-unit quotas, I suggest you investigate and subsequently close down all production lines for product 34216. Respectfully, Shareholder 703286543, J. Stalin, Esq.”

Next morning he dropped his tiny bombshell into the yellow and black striped box marked Suggestions.

Within two weeks the members of Shift C were relocated to new production lines. Johnny Stalin smiled to himself to think of the grey men in grey suits discovering to their horror the economic abomination of a factory that constantly built and dismantled the same article over and over and over again. When the relocation was done, Shareholder 703286543 found himself in a new room in a new corridor working on a new line at a new credit rating. He bought a little radio for his room so that he could listen to the New Big Band Hour on Sunday afternoons. He liked the new music very much; Hamilton Bohannon, Buddy Mercx, Jimmy Chung, and the greatest of the great, Glenn Miller. He could afford to buy the little trinkets and bauds from the costermongers on Miracle Mall that made all the difference to Company work overalls. He could afford to get drunk three nights a week. He could afford a girlfriend; a thin, crop-haired child with glasses whom he took for romantic (and expensive) promenades by Sepia Bay and upon whom he lavished his money but starved of his trust. Some grey suit in managerial was taking an interest in him, he reckoned, and he decided to keep the fires of that interest well-stoked and the grey-suited guardian angels hovering near.

At lunch one day he overheard Shareholder 108462793 whisper something to Shareholder 93674306 while passing the sauce bottle around a Union meeting in the back of Delahanty’s Bar. In the cubicle in the men’s toilet Johnny Stalin pencilled a little note to the angels in grey and relinquished it to the Suggestion box.

Shareholders 108462793 and 93674306 were absent from work the next day, and the next, and the next, and then the line supervisor informed the shift that they had volunteered for redeployment to another line because of manning shortages. Johnny Stalin would almost have believed it had he not heard the sounds of Company police raiding Delahanty’s rattling from his air conditioning slot. He had had to turn his radio up quite loud to drown out the shouts and cries. Shareholder 396243088 next door had banged on the wall most unpleasantly for an hour or more for him to keep it down.

Two days later Shareholder 396243088 made a joke over lunch about the sexual conduct of Company directors during board meetings. Johnny Stalin had roared with laughter like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, he sent a little note to the grey suit.

“I accuse Shareholder 396243088 of not subscribing to Proper Thought with regard to the Company, its Venerable Board of Directors, and the principles of industrial feudalism. He is disloyal and disrespectful and I suspect him of holding pro-union sympathies.”

When Shareholder 396243088’s job as Section Overseer suddenly became vacant ("Relocation and Promotion,” said the line supervisor), Johnny Stalin was the youngest man ever to be promoted to the position in the light agricultural engineering division. He held the credit rating of a man five times his age and experience. The Model Worker of the Year (light engineering section) awards came upon their annual rounds. Johnny Stalin anonymously exposed a system of petty corruption and pilfering with connections as high as junior management and, by good timing, became Model Worker of the Year (light engineering section) just two days before the corporate axe fell on twelve jobs in the agricultural division. In a sound display of Shareholder solidarity, Johnny Stalin declined to attend the Company tribunal sessions in which the twelve defendants were charged by the court of workforce and management alike and summarily dismissed. “It could have been any of us,” said the Model Worker of the Year to his colleagues on Shift A as they sipped tangerine daiquiris in the newly refurbished Delahanty’s Bar. “It could happen to anyone.”

It did. It happened to Shareholder 26844437 (I suspect Shareholder of engaging in industrial espionage and gross betrayal for rival companies which I, being a loyal and true Shareholder, shall not mention by name, respectfully, J. Stalin) Shareholders 216447890 and 552706123 (I suspect Shareholders of having illicit sexual congress on Company time, respectfully, J. Stalin), and Shareholder 664973505 (I accuse Shareholder Line Supervisor on Production Line 76543, Light Agricultural Engi neering division, of laxity, sloth and absence of zeal in promoting the Ninefold Virtues of Industrial Feudalism, respectfully, J. Stalin).

It was merely a matter of time before the grey suits invited this paragon of industrial virtue to join junior management. It was then that he discovered that there had not been one grey suit, but eleven of them, now covering three sides of an oak table, all of them rolled off whatever production line it was that manufactured junior managers. At the head of the table sat the oldest junior, the grey suit to whom the other grey suits deferred. At the bottom of the table, a respectful distance from the luminaries of the managerial castes, stood Johnny Stalin. Oldest grey suit made a short speech filled with expressions like “model worker,” “shining example,” “productive unit,” “Company loyalty,” “Higher values,” and “Shareholder who understands the principles of Industrial Feudalism.” Johnny Stalin carefully memorized these cliches to use in his own speeches of praise and exhortation. After the interview, sticky cocktails were served, congratulations delivered, and Johnny Stalin bowed himself out of the presence of the managerial caste. On his return to his numbered room he found an envelope containing his relocation documents to the production management training unit pushed under his door. On the back of the door he found a standard-sized paper suit, grey, hanging from a plastic hanger, grey.