Time of Leaders, Part 2 of 11

“I have to ask,” Charlie said. “How good were your scores in reading comprehension?”

            “Not a problem.”

            “A’s?”

            I nodded and slipped the tray into the bag.

            “Well, there’s a group hiring at that old school building in Quarrytown, and they’re looking for readers.”

            “What sort of position?”

            “Reading. Readers. Get your ID and leadership certificates, go down there during business hours next week, and they’ll take you through the process. They know that you might show up, but I suggest you get there quick. You see, it’s a job. Don’t want to get your hopes up, though.”

The day before, with the threat of bodily harm, I was worried that I wouldn’t get out of it with my handful of brush. Now it was all the curly fries I cared to eat, smiles, new friends and a job description that described my compulsion. But after we cleared up which abandoned school Charlie was talking about, distance became an issue. It was quite a ways from where I lived.

            “But the walk,” I told them. “Bob lets me live in a squat here.”

            “I rent a house on 24^th avenue five blocks from the school,” Jade said. “Are you clean.”

            “I’m clean.”

            She pointed. “Clean-clean.” When I was a potential threat back in the funnel, that was one thing. Messing up her house was a capital offence.

            “Yes.”

            “I can let you have a room for fifty a month if you get the job.”

For a few reasons, the curly fries in my stomach were rebelling again. She looked to Charlie.

            “Then you’ll be looking for things to spend the rest of your money on,” he told me. “If that’s the case, welcome to the club.”

            It seemed that they had completed their main objective, but Jade had another important question. She leaned forward.

            “I’ve asked Charlie this. When you read, especially fiction, is it as if stars, rainbows, unicorns and spaceships come flying out of the book?”

            Charlie muttered “…or witches on brooms?...”

            Jade dismissed Charlie’s comment with a grimace and a flick of her hand. “Like in the PSAs they used to show on television.”

            I told her that it was sometimes like that, and Charlie agreed. He asked me if I’d read War and Peace.

            “A couple, three times.”

            “I tried it, and I couldn’t get far,” Charlie said.

            “I have an old film of that,” Jade told me. “With Audrey Hepburn.” A confiding nod. The world had more than curly fries. “But it couldn’t cover,” she said, “what. A thousand pages?”

            “A bit more than that.”

            They laughed.

            “Think of it as ten small books!”

            A group in a booth about twenty feet away joined Jade and Charlie in continued laughter.

            “What? Family life, war, romance, what else is there?” Jade asked. Charlie chuckled: “..uh-oh…”

            “Tolstoy’s opinion of how history should be seen,” I told them. “That Napoleon was out in front of a movement as much, or even more, than he was actually leading it.”

            “Stop! Stop…” Charlie was throwing in the towel, but Jade was nodding.

            “…of course…”

            “If it were up to me, you’d have the job,” Charlie told me.

It might have been the Coke speaking, but I continued for Jade’s benefit.

            “It was written around the time of our Civil War.”

            “Which one?” Those at that other booth joined Charlie in a laugh as they settled their bill and prepared to leave. But there was more entertainment to be had. I could see Bess with her fuzzy cap and clipboard outside the plate glass window to my right, past Charlie. I raised a hand in surrender to her, and she hoisted her clipboard and said a few things that we couldn’t hear.

            “What does she want?” Jade asked.

            “I think she wants me to reconfirm my commitment to her club.”

            “What club?” Charlie asked.

            I told them that it had never been very clear.

 

The next day I got up before Bess was around and walked to the abandoned school. The entrance to the Tenger project was along the side of the building. It was sparsely furnished, with the receptionist at a buffet table. She had a form and an ID badge for me. It seems that I was expected. I was taken to a room nearby by the boss, Matthew. He was what we might call ‘a knower’. My arrival was noted by a group in the room next door, which was separated from mine by a thick pane of glass set in cinder block. I stared at my testing station in disbelief. It consisted of a steel desk, with a state of the art screen module along with an ancient keyboard. The man asked if I had ‘typing skills’. Thinking that it might be a deal breaker, I shook my head ‘no’.

“It’s not important right now,” he said. “We’ll train you on it if it’s called for. The machine wants us to avoid the use of voice or stylus in the project. It wants precision. Have you ever used a rotary telephone?”

I shook my head sadly. He chuckled and told me that he was kidding. He said that I should end every response by pressing a large ‘Enter’ key on the keyboard, and left the room.

I was a little insecure about the whole thing. There were about five people on the other side of the glass, busy with something, but keeping an eye on me. A week before, I’d taken advantage of an inexplicable period of available electric power to shave my head with clippers, listening to emergency vehicles race around the area, tending to fires caused by brittle wires. Then, after an hour, the power went off again, so I finished the job with a razor by flashlight. That morning I’d made sure to wear my best clothes, but even those had patches.

The machine began with a few greetings and short questions, which I answered ‘hunting and pecking’ on the keyboard. Matthew gave me hints from the other side of the glass, mouthing and gesturing: ‘press enter’. Then the machine gave me a series of paragraphs to read, along with multiple choice questions to answer. I’d seen that before, in somewhat similar situations. At times I would glance back at the window, and Matthew would raise a thumb. A deadly cutiful proctor sat at her station toward the back of that fishbowl, next to the fishbowl that I was in. I wondered to what degree I was actually interacting with a machine, and if it was lesser, I hoped that she was the one who was included. This was just out of principle, of course, considering my physical state. I’d had so few opportunities to show off over the past months. Once, during all of this, out of the corner of my eye I could see someone doing what I believe is called ‘the blowfish’ on the other side of the glass.

The screen went blank for a second, then the machine began to issue instructions. My working hours would be 10 to 4, Monday through Friday, at a little over minimum wage. There were cheers and groans from the fishbowl. I turned quickly to the window to smiles and raised thumbs. Money exchanged hands. The screen told me that I would be reading, then marking paragraphs according to their level of importance, keeping in mind that the project wasn’t concerned about what had happened, namely: ‘World economic depression, wars and civil unrest’, but how it could have happened. I would practice typing toward the end of the shift, the better to help the machine. I consented to being a part of the study, then the machine brought up tax forms, and through that and the pay rate declaration I knew that the nation and state were still extant.

 

Matthew drove me to Rooster’s, where Jade and Charlie were waiting. It had been arranged that I would gather my few things from the old squat and he would drive me back into Quarrytown. He assured me that I would be given plenty of time to learn typing. It was necessary, but not crucial at that point in the project. There would be plenty of filing work for me to do in the meantime. When we got to Rooster’s there was a celebration buffet waiting for me. It was curly fries again, but this time they were decorated with frilly toothpicks. Matthew joined others; some people I recognized from the day before. Brenda, Jade’s friend, was at our table. She ran a bait stall up the wash, where there were still a few ponds nearby.

            “More and more people come to the bait shop just for the protein,” Jade told me.

            “They ask where things were caught or seined,” Brenda explained. “Not much fishing being done in the river, especially since they started finding those two-headed minnows.”

            “Fisher beware,” Charlie added. “Hey!” he shouted to me. “Your scrounging days are over!”

            “Foraging!” Jade said. “And they aren’t over. No meat to be had, and beans are going through the roof.” Then to me: “You have to teach me how to forage.”

            I told her that I would. We watched Bess walk by the restaurant. She didn’t look in.

            “I think she knows,” I sighed. I dug into the curly fries. Jade wanted to know how well Bess and I knew each other. I didn’t mind the subject being broached, or the others hearing my answer.

            “Not well enough for her to know that there’s a back door to my squat.”

            “She’s done some good!” We each invited Brenda’s observation to our own degree. “I had a booth at her ‘What’s So Funny About The Apocalypse Festival’.”

            I remembered it. Jade and Charlie hadn’t known that it happened.

            “It was great!” Brenda continued. “What a time to get together. Liquor stores emptied, three degrees, and we didn’t wanna know what was in the wind.”

            Charlie mentioned that we still didn’t know what was in the yellow fallout a year and a half before, or where it came from, exactly. Brenda explained more about what happened in our township to Jade and Charlie.

            “No one knew what was going on, and Bess dressed up as a town crier. We wanted to hire her full-time.” She turned to me. “But there’s always the next issue for her. She always wants to keep that ball rolling.”

            “Even when it’s out of air,” Charlie added.

            “What’s the project like?” Jade asked me. “Juggling files and mug shots on a translucent screen?”

            “A lot of it is very lo-tech.”

            Charlie was surprised. “Tenger’s one of the world’s largest companies. Out of Canada, from what I know. But it’s not like I’m getting Fortune magazine.”

            I told them that it seemed to be a bare-bones operation, centering around a computer that just wanted to know. Jade smirked. Charlie puffed.

            “Jade here’s been known to use the epithet ‘knower’ now and again. Especially with me.”

            “Not ‘know-er’,” Jade said confidently, but quietly. She chose Brenda for her one-syllable demonstration, jutting her face to hers.

“Nor.”

            Brenda tittered. Jade now emphasized the word, now like a cat ridding itself of a hairball.

            “Nor.”

            Brenda explained it to me.

            “We spelled the two for her on a napkin at the Vortex.”

            “Words should be spelled like they’re pronounced, then.” Jade complained. “Not with that funny ‘kn!’”

            Again, the cat.

            “Kn!”

            Now she was the ‘rat’, and I was the one in the figurative lab coat. I hoped that they were all at least half-kidding. She couldn’t be illiterate and have the job she did. But I wouldn’t have thought less of Jade if she were weak in reading. That would have only put her in the majority. And she was continuing to learn, despite everything.

            “The question is,” Charlie rheted, “how much understanding can come from pure knowledge.”

            Jade nodded. “Like that kid in one of my classes.” Charlie and Brenda had heard her example before, so Jade told me. “He was the last to have power in his tablet, way back when. Raises his hand: ‘The main export of Madagascar is coffee!’.” Jade chuckled. “We were just chatting about animated movies…” She looked to me in expectation.

            “I’m a ‘nor’,” I told her. She nodded and leaned back, enlisting me, not only for answers, but for other things.

            “I’m a ‘nor’, kinda through the back door,” I told her.

            “Back door of the public library.” Charlie had me. He knew my story. I muttered a curse.

            “That was on the way out,” I responded. Jade laughed, so she knew. Brenda was intrigued. Charlie reassured me.

            “You were a kid! Juvie don’t count!” He looked to Matthew’s table. “They probably know already, and if not, they’d love to hear the story.”

            “So would I,” Brenda said. So I told her my story, also filling in the gaps for my defense for Charlie and Jade, there in Rooster’s.