I'm writing a short story called The Workhouse. This is the first installment. The inspiration came to me as I watched Dark City in a corner of my desktop. I remember how strikingly original it was, how much of a psychological and existential puzzle it provided - a teaser for us to consider what it is about our humanity that makes us desire. The balance between heart and mind, between the illusion of time and sensation and the illusion of thought - this continuing consciousness we experience. And I am coming to the conclusion, a bit surreptitiously, that there is nothing that can be so alien to us as we might imagine. So what could we imagine?
I happen to think we imagine ourselves in the wrong direction, away from virtue into a sort of cynical oblivion - we meaning Americans, and at the same time we wish for some searing reality to give us human instincts again. The Workhouse is the story of a man who typifies this laziness but finds a way out. Maybe. I wanted to make it very sensual and impressionistic so I'm writing in the first person, as if I could many other ways...
Life is a prison, or at least it should be lived as if that were the case. I thought the other day while listening to Niall Ferguson's description of the English workhouse, how somebody might turn a profit in American providing such an experience to our Baby Boomers. How could we, if we were conscripted by a document of our own signing into a one year rehabilitation, find the beauty of work? It might go something like this...
The Workhouse - Part One: Getting There
They said that I should take a pill and so I did. It was a small pinkish one in a lozenge shape rather like the ones I press into Fester's sausage biscuit every night before I put him under the house. I thought I might never see Fester again, but I'm sure there must be dogs in South Dakota. Perhaps they would have guard dogs outside the compound or perhaps the warden would be stroking a small one in his lap as he marched us into our pens. My imagination roamed over such matters as I watched the familiar warm glow of Los Angeles fade out the left window. The Hyperion treatment plant passed beneath the wing, then the refinery, then all of the South Bay as I turned my head away and stared at the orange square pushbutton above my head. I had called for help once before this trip, and now as the pill took effect I was becoming more anxious instead of less. I forced myself awake one last time but the roar of the engines was oddly calming.
Donna was a pack rat. I should have known that when the unruly stacks of documents covered her breasts across the polished surface of the conference room table that there was an evil logic to it. Incomprehensible to me for sure, but the way she made her attorney understand everything wrong within the space of 17 days let me know that it was finished. It was her chaos that thrilled me for nine years, she was my humbling honey but I never thought she'd spring the trap with such precision. It was the one place I thought I was safe. I guess she finally figured out that she wasn't crazy, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that she realized she could use that crazy in a destructive way, it was her super power in the end. Not to say that I didn't fight, but Lloyd simply couldn't swing it. Bastard.
I don't remember disembarking or getting onto the bus. It was like sleepwalking a dream from Stephen King's 'The Stand' mouth wide open in disbelief and sublimating the reality. I only remember Wendy Sun telling me with those fierce eyes of hers what it was like when Mao took her father's factory and she walked and walked until her feet were hard and bloody. The bus bumped me awake, the brushed aluminum rail above the seat in front of me pitched against my drooping forehead. I bit my lip and things began to sharpen. I was cold, and the murmurs of the other passengers began to become intelligible. Outside to the right was a bluish pink nothingness of sky - it seemed to be morning. There were bare stalks of corn out to infinity in ragged rows. How could anything so sad looking be so organized? There were flecks of snow patches on the dark soil in between I could catch as the moire patterns reversed the buses motions. I move my head jogging it awake to freeze the motion picture on the other side of the safety glass and the pathetic stalks became identifyable in their pity. If I was corn standing, I would pray to be mowed down. Maybe the answer to my prayer is here in Wakonda. But we're not there yet.
I buried my face in my soft hands and tried to feel my eyebrows in my palms. I could blink and sense the lashes but my head was numb. I did that fake yoga thing and pushed in my temples. Nothing was changing except my feeling for the need to do something except I didn't yet have the energy. I was deflated like a punching clown finally knocked over. I rumaged around my pocket to see if there was another pill. It could be in the crease with the lint but I had no nails to dig it out. It was as if I were blind and all of my senses had been pushed away from my head into the insectoid antennae of my hands and fingers. My head didn't exist except for a dull pain and my brain simply idled in neutral. I turned my pocket inside out with my eyes closed and listened for the click of the pills on the plastic seat, but over the grumble of the bus it was impossible. I assumed it and felt around, antlike, for my nodule of peace. Ah. Instead of swallowing it like I did the first time with the gob of spit I could generate, I crunched it between my molars in my sticky dry mouth tasting the bitter aspiriny edge. I pushed back into the seat finally realizing how tired my wrists were, vaguely human, closed my eyes after one last squint at the passing corn and finally let the medications and seat vibrations numb my head further into oblivion.
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