Twisting Topeka (4 page)

Craig Paschang

The cold winter wind whipped through
Grigory O’Sullivan’s thick red beard as he darted from the tramway.
He wouldn’t be out at this hour or in this weather on a normal
evening. But duty called; the Party came first.

The city center was mostly dark; a
café ahead on the right was still inhabited, casting a pale warm
wedge of light in futile resistance to the bitter night. A man
behind the counter stared back at Grigory as he passed; his eyes
were black and dull.

Grigory pulled his
fur-lined collar closer about his neck as he turned the corner onto
Tenth Avenue—
no, onto
Brezhnev
Avenue
, he reminded himself—and the wind caught him square in the
face. If only it had been snowing, he might have been able to call
someone at the Committee and beg the evening off, to return home
and crawl back under the covers with Katya and watch whatever was
on the First Channel at this time of night.

But it was not snowing, and he was
expected to show that he was made of tougher stuff.

He cut the corner at Holliday Avenue;
though the rules were closely followed in Lewellingrad, and
information about rule-breakers a commodity of its own, he didn’t
think anyone would mind him jaywalking or cutting across the lawn
so late at night. And he loved seeing the People’s House from that
angle, where the limestone columns and sharp rooflines tugged at
each other like dancers.

He let himself in through a
ground-floor entrance; and up to his office through the back
stairs. He sat at his desk in the dark for just a moment. He loved
this view. His office was in the attic, and he knew that was the
second-worst place to have been assigned (besides the basement),
but it didn’t feel like it, not with that view. Across the street,
illuminated from below with ground-level spotlights that lent its
concrete edifice a beautiful harshness, stood the Justice Center, a
strong Brutalist structure that predated the Revolution but
unintentionally presaged the Party’s arrival. The narrow pillars of
its façade seemed too small to carry the weight of its cantilevered
floors, much as the proletariat once seemed too small to carry the
weight of the capitalist’s yoke. But the building endured, and the
proletariat triumphed.

Grigory turned on his small desk lamp
and fed his electric typewriter a piece of cheap paper. The
contrast between these two tools of his trade was jarring and
inescapable. The typewriter, a newer model produced by the
Industrial Combine, had memory functions and an auto-spell. It was
black and sleek and looked like it came from the future. It
represented all of the power and industrial might of the Party. The
paper, which was thin enough to trace through, had barely even been
bleached white. It had been designed specifically for use in a
typewriter—a sharpened pencil would tear right through it—and then
sent to a photocopier for reproduction. It had been over-engineered
to the point of serving a single, replaceable function, and was too
fragile to do anything else. Which also, in a way, represented the
Party.

But am I the paper or the
typewriter?

He shouldn’t have asked.

*****

Morning found him still hunched over
his small desk in his small office. The plaza was beginning to fill
with workers dressed in long coats and thick hats on their way to
work before the sun rose above the housing blocs on the east side
of the city center. Grigory watched them, half asleep, a dull ache
having settled in the middle of his back.

A knock on his door startled him.
“Come.”

The door opened with a creak. “Comrade
O’Sullivan, come to breakfast.” His friend Pyotr stood in the
doorway, his cheeks red from the walk to work. “There are duck
eggs.” Pyotr knew Grigory loved duck eggs.

“
Yes, alright, Comrade. I
could use some coffee, too.”

“
Burning the midnight oil
again?”

“
It’s just the farm bill.”
Grigory tried to stretch out his back as he stood.

“
They need something to
debate today, then.” Pyotr gave him a conspiratorial
wink.

Grigory sighed as he raised his arm to
show Pyotr out of his office. There was always something for the
Party members to debate; there just wasn’t always a bill to ground
their debate in reality. As a legislative draftsman, it was
Grigory’s job to make sure that didn’t happen very
often.

“
Yes, Comrade. Today and
every day.” Grigory closed his office door behind him. He didn’t
bother to lock it.

*****

Breakfast was pleasant enough. Many of
the Konza Oblast Party Committee members were in attendance, making
a show of greeting each other and the Committee staffers. Grigory
tried not to be disdainful of their fine suits and clear
eyes.

Pyotr regaled him with the
latest rumors on each one as he walked by. This one had a new
mistress; that one’s youngest son received permission to go to
university abroad; this other one was mounting a campaign to run
for the Central Committee; that other one had secretly celebrated
Christmas (
Can’t you see his new
pocketwatch?
Pyotr asked, pointing at the
man’s waistcoat.)

But for all the pomp, the
Party-sponsored breakfast was a little meager. There had been duck
eggs, as Pyotr had promised, and bacon, and griddle-cakes, and some
strawberries that must have come from Mexico or somewhere. But the
thin and gray-skinned kitchen staff ensured no one—not even the
Oblast Secretary who came downstairs for a few minutes towards the
end—received more than a modestly-sized portion.

Pyotr ate quickly and
excused himself; as a Liaison Officer for the Security Committee,
he had several things to finish up before the Party Committee began
its first meeting. “Just a few reports.” But they both knew reports
were never
just
reports.

Grigory walked back to his office
alone. The People’s House was over a hundred years old, but the
former occupants had obscured its mural-covered hallways and built
offices out into the open spaces. The Party had been restoring the
building almost since taking up residence; but there was still a
lot of work to be done, and not a lot of room in the Oblast budget
to complete the work. A carpenter avoided Grigory’s glance as he
walked by.

The sun had risen high enough to cast
Grigory’s office in a bath of orange light. He was about to step
into that pool of sunbeams, though it promised no warmth, when he
realized the draft bill was missing from his desk.

He quickly closed his door and took
stock of his office. Everything was where it was supposed to be;
everything except the bill.

Not that bill. Not that
one. Not today.

It was a joke. He hadn’t
meant anything by it. He still had plenty of time to fix it. It was
just that in the early hours of the morning, when the bill was
close enough to completion that his sleepless-ly fuzzy brain
couldn’t choose between orneriness and celebration, he’d changed
some of the words. A
lot
of the words.

It hadn’t been a bill on
the desk next to his typewriter when he left for breakfast. It had
been a
manifesto
.
An indictment. A rumination and a prescription. A scathing review
and a heartfelt sermon. It was everything he knew he shouldn’t say,
most of the things he knew he couldn’t say, and quite a few of the
things he knew he wouldn’t have said if he hadn’t been called in so
late on such a cold night.

It wasn’t a bill. It was a
confession.

Changing his name had been easy; Pyotr
had done it, too, and Katya had once been Catie. He could call his
state the Konza Oblast and its capital city Lewellingrad with
stumbling; he had learned the new street names and mostly got them
right the first time. He enjoyed looking through the House of
Prototypes catalogue that came each fall, if only because Katya
always told him he had the perfect frame for the newer styles. In
all the little outward ways that anyone who was paying attention
would notice, he had remade himself to fit squarely and securely
into the new order. But changing his beliefs had been
harder.

Even after ten years as a Party
member, he wasn’t a communist. This deficiency hardly surprised
him; he had never cared for the parties that had once vied for
control of the state, and he hadn’t much cared in school when they
learned about the parties that had come before—although this newest
one had been smart to invoke the battle cries of Mary Elizabeth
Lease and her contemporaries when they came in with their new
“People’s Party.” They hadn’t even needed the tanks that were
waiting on great ships just offshore and in the bellies of great
planes circling overhead; they only needed to win Afghanistan and
promise the people of the plains that their sons would no longer be
sent abroad to fight on foreign soil, their grocery shelves would
never again be empty, and their voice would always be heard. After
fifteen years of war and two very hard winters, that had been
enough for Grigory—and for most everyone else.

The Revolution’s only casualty was an
elderly man who collapsed walking to the church two streets over to
cast his vote on the referendum. Grigory didn’t feel like a traitor
when he cast his vote; he felt like a pragmatist. In truth, though
he had often claimed allegiance to one political party or another,
often vociferously, and just as often rather sincerely, Grigory had
always simply voted for the person who made the most
sense.

It was easier now: though the Party
committees had their debates and power struggles behind the scenes,
there was only ever one candidate. He still went to the rallies,
and the canvasses, though the Party always seemed to put up
candidates who were indistinguishable from each other in their zeal
and, eventually, in their inefficacy. He wore his Party-approved
coat and waved his Party flag. He did all the right things, and he
said all the right things. It had been easy to blend in, toe the
line, do his job, and keep his family fed.

But now they would know. They would
know that he was not reformed. That a full belly was not enough to
buy his loyalty. That he didn’t care for the Party Committee
members or their platforms or their hypocritical fancy suits. That
he thought the whole system was a sham.

If only he had shrugged off Pyotr’s
invitation and fixed the draft, like he had planned. But no. He had
to have his duck eggs. Had it been worth it? Whoever had that sheaf
of papers, whatever they intended to do with it, Grigory’s career
was likely over. If he acted fast, he might be able to save
something of his reputation, find a job with less responsibility in
a suburb or a farm town somewhere. Katya could even have a
garden.

He turned for the door—but behind the
glazed window stood the shadow of a man, hand drawn back to rap on
the glass in a rude knock.

Grigory saved him the effort and
opened the door.

*****

Grigory couldn’t remember if he’d ever
been in the Secretary’s office before. He’d worked in the People’s
House long enough he surely must have entered the room for
something or other at some point. But its smallness surprised him.
Maybe he hadn’t been in there before.

The Secretary sat
cross-legged behind his desk, leafing through the papers that had
been left in an office that should have been locked. Now that he
was only a few feet from the man, Grigory could see that his suit
was well-made but not new; his glasses were chipped in a few places
along the rim; his eyes were puffy with redness and lack of sleep.
Grigory looked around the office again; the bookcases were plain,
the carpet a little worn, the paintings on the wall were poster
prints. He briefly entertained the thought that this man, the most
powerful in the Konza Oblast, was a
true
believer
. He wasn’t sure if that should
worry him.

The Secretary finished reading, put
the papers on his desk and worked a phlegmy cough as politely as
possible. He took off his glasses with his left hand and rubbed his
temples with his right. He put his glasses back on and stared at
Grigory. His tired eyes were blue and sharp.

“
Tell me
Tovarishch
O’Sullivan,”
he started, using the formal Russian term as if to remind Grigory
that although he had lost most of his accent he had not lost his
ties to the Motherland, “why does the Party Committee debate a farm
bill every spring?”

Grigory contemplated his response.
Giving the Secretary the same answer he’d just read in the stolen
papers was obviously not an option, but he was hard pressed to come
up with a better one.

“
Do you think it is to make
a show? To fill the radio waves with sound bites and catchphrases?
To quell the people, to convince them the merits of growing crops
that receive almost no subsidy from the Central Committee? To trick
them into mere obedience?”

Grigory chose not to
answer.

The Secretary grew tired of
waiting.

“
It’s because we have
quotas. Our Republic stands in unity with other soviet republics
across the globe. There are radicals who would shatter the bonds
that tie us together with so-called ‘decentralization’ efforts. The
only way to stop them is to protect the system of mutual
cooperation we have so carefully established.