We Others (16 page)

5

I returned to the Under, rode up to the cubicles, and walked out into the parking lot. The sun was so bright that I had to shade my eyes with my hand. Heat rose from the asphalt and from the cars, brilliant in sunlight, sitting there row on row. I remembered how, not so many years ago, the parking lot had been a field of high grass and wild asters, next to the mall. Twenty years back, the mall itself wasn’t there, this part of town was still farm country, and before that, who knows, bobcats and Indians. Things were always changing, there was no stopping it, and as I walked toward the car I had the feeling that if I looked over my shoulder I would see machines tearing down the building behind me, erecting steel columns, lifting sheets of glass high into the air.

For the next few days I went about my business, without thinking about anything. But I must have been turning things over in my mind, because a few days later I accepted the position offered in the letter. Two weeks after that I started my on-job training program. This took place on the ground floor, in a small office in one of the new extensions. About a week into the program I sold my house to The Next Thing at better than market value and signed up for one of the houses in a new neighborhood down below. It was a good location, away from the delivery depots. The lot was smaller than what I was used to, but the house had a granite-topped island in the kitchen, airtight triple-track windows, and a front porch with a glider. It cost me nothing except a security deposit and the first month’s rent, and they even threw in the moving costs. It was difficult for a while, driving each day from my new neighborhood to the parking lot on the other side of the trees, entering the Under, riding an up escalator, and making my way to the office in the extension, but on the positive side I was able to go shopping without changing levels, the training program was expertly run, and I knew that life would improve once I began my new job.

In those days I still sometimes visited the old town, where things were changing. The small stores on Main Street were gone—Politano’s Variety, Klein’s Men’s Shop, the tobacconist’s and the newsstand—but the street had shaken off its slump and was flourishing: the old places were now specialty outlets of The Next Thing, with big plate-glass windows and new awnings, where people in the upper town could do their shopping without having to go down to the Under. On the outskirts of town, the mall had been transformed into a suite of NT offices with a new main entranceway and a second floor. Next to the mall, the old building of The Next Thing was closed for renovations, except for a single door where you could enter. Inside, I saw workmen bolting steel beams to columns as they blocked out the inner walls of a new five-story office building. On the ground floor, past the open door, only a few of the old cubicles remained. Through the wrought-iron fence I saw a flat expanse of dirt stretching away.

The houses in town were changing, too. All but a stubborn handful now belonged to top-level employees, who were building wings, adding floors, erecting upper balconies and decorative towers. I saw three-car garages, front walks flanked by stone lions, porches with high white columns, doors with stained-glass sidelights and Victorian fanlights. Birdhouses shaped like hotels hung from the branches of shade trees. Gardeners kneeled beside beds of geraniums.

I began work a few weeks later, in an annex built out from two aisles of the Under. That was fifteen months ago. The hours were a little longer than I’d expected, because apart from the official workday, nine to six, there was the scheduled work that had to be completed each day before you went home, so that you expanded your hours to fit the work in. Luckily it was possible to save time because of the short drive home. Since I had to pass through the Under on my way to and from work, I picked up what I needed during the week. On Sundays I sometimes visited the upper town for an hour or two, though I was usually so tired that I just paid bills and did the crossword puzzle.

Last time I was up there, I paid a visit to the old neighborhood. On my block I barely recognized my house, with its third story and its bay-windowed wing off the bedrooms. Across the street some high school boys were playing basketball on a driveway, with a high white house rising up behind. I watched them from the curb. They were tall, quick-moving, their hair shining in the sun, but what struck me was the grace of their bodies, the easy flow of their movements. Then I became aware of something else, which must have been there all along—a steady banter, a light playfulness, that seemed to grow out of the flowing motions, unless it was another form of the same thing. It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard that sound for a while, down in my town.

As I stood there watching, a security guard in a dark green uniform strolled over from around the corner. He asked to see my Employee Number. “Planning to stay long?” he said as he handed back my card. He thrust his fingertips under the wide black belt around his waist and looked at me curiously. “We don’t get many of you up here,” he said.

These days my work keeps me busy. I usually don’t get home till after eight, and there’s a lot of pressure to do more, to show them what you’re made of. It’s what you’ve got to expect in an expanding organization like this. They want you to work hard, they believe in hard work, and if you slack off you get a warning. Three warnings and you’re out—out of a job, and out of a house, since they won’t renew the lease. You have to move to some other town and make room for the next employee. They mean business down here. After a long day of entering sales rates from housewares, electronics, and building supplies into a database, I like to come home and stretch out on the sofa, where I sometimes fall asleep in front of the TV before I make dinner. I work a half day on Saturday and generally go in for a few hours in the afternoon, and on Sunday, my day off, I do my catch-up shopping and my household chores.

Sometimes, when I’m wandering the aisles of the Under with my cart, or sitting on my glider on my lamp-lit front porch on a Sunday afternoon, I’ll have a sudden memory of the town up there, where I used to live. I can see my childhood home, with its deep cool cellar and its sunny kitchen, and the later house, with the screened back porch that looked out at the catalpa tree. I remember the big rubbery leaves of the catalpa, the green cigars hanging down, the play of light on the porch screens. I like thinking of those houses, but that isn’t the same as wanting them back. They’re part of another time, that’s all. Some people talk about that time the way they talk about everything in the past, as if it has a special glow. Well, it does have that glow. It’s the glow of something you can’t get to anymore, the glow of something no longer there. If you reach out for it, you won’t feel anything at all.

Things have been pretty steady down here, though there have been some changes. The old Returnways were shut down about six months ago, and the last of the escalators stopped running fairly recently. People complain about it, but why should the escalators run if no one up there comes down to the Under, and besides, you can still climb the stairs if you want to get out for a while. Some of the neighborhoods down here aren’t kept up the way they should be, especially the run-down ones near the delivery depots, where goods come down at all hours and trucks are always on the move. Sometimes there’s a run on some item in the Under, like gas grills or grow lights, and they don’t restock as fast as they used to. You can go to the Complaint Department and fill out a form, but the place is hard to get to and the lines are long.

You hear people say things are better up there, but I don’t know about that. Isn’t that what people always say, about someplace else? I’ve even heard talk about how we look different, down here. I suppose there’s a certain truth to that. We’re bound to grow pale, living the way we do, it’s only to be expected, except of course for the ones who turn wrong shades of dark with their tanning lamps and their skin creams. In thirty years, some say, we’ll all be soft white squishy things with fat legs and little squinty eyes. These are people who are usually trying to get you to join their gym or take some miracle health remedy. It’s true there’s a tiredness about us sometimes, a heaviness. You can see it in the Under. The other night I saw a woman from my annex just standing there, in the middle of an aisle, with slumped shoulders, not moving, her eyes not looking anywhere, her hands hanging down. But what do you expect, after working a long shift every day, six days a week? That explains a lot of the faces, with their dead eyes, their saggy mouths. People are tired, that’s what it is. They move slowly, when they’re not working. Chins hang low. Flesh builds over the hips, moves down over the tops of shoes. There’s no escaping it. And if, as some say, people down here fall sick all the time with headaches and upper respiratory infections and what have you, well, they can go straight to the new infirmary built out from the Under and make up the work later. You’d think people never fell sick up there. You’d think people up there never had problems of their own. As I see it, there’s nothing to be gained by wishing you had something else. Maybe it’s true that things are different up there, maybe people up there get through life in a different way, without our troubles. Speaking for myself, I’m no worse off down here than I was up there, with more money in the bank from the sale of my house, though the hours are longer than I thought and the streetlamps keep flickering out. When a tree falls over you can wait weeks before a truck with
NT
on the side comes around to pick it up, and there’s no denying they’re behind on street repairs. Sometimes you hear talk about improvements, like an elevated monorail system that would eliminate ground traffic, but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t care for the fortune-telling parlors that are springing up all over, or the fad for ghosts and spirits, or the new cults you keep hearing about, like the Fourth Millennium and the Prophets of Doom, though I suppose people need something to do when they’re not working. Things may not be exactly what I thought they’d be, back then, but things weren’t perfect up there, not by a long shot. As for work, everyone works, you work till you drop, it’s how things are. In nine months I’m up for promotion, with a good chance of moving to the office next to this one, with a big window looking out at the lot.

The other day we heard that the last house was sold in the Over, which is what we down here call the upper town. Rumor has it that field personnel from the Contact Office have been seen in nearby towns, visiting malls, taking photographs, and questioning shoppers. There’s talk of plans for new underground neighborhoods. You hear about bigger and better Unders, connecting tunnels, a town beneath our town. It’s hard to know what to make of all that. These are interesting times.

We Others

1

We others are not like you. We are more prickly, more jittery, more restless, more reckless, more secretive, more desperate, more cowardly, more bold. We live at the edges of ourselves, not in the middle places. We leave that to you. Did I say: more watchful? That above all. We watch you, we follow you, we spy on you, we obsess over you. We crave your attention. We hunger for a sign. We humiliate ourselves—always. Hence our scorn, our famous bitterness. But what’s all that to you?

My name, if I still have a name, is Paul Steinbach. I was born in Brooklyn Heights, in the middle of the last century. Of my childhood apartment on Joralemon Street I remember only a kitchen so narrow that I had to squeeze past my mother’s legs, a little balcony behind a high window that I was forbidden to open, and a mahogany oval table covered with puzzle pieces. I can still see my father sitting next to me on a rug, opening a squeaky black bag and drawing from it, very slowly, a long snaky thing with a silver circle at one end. He raises the object solemnly toward my face, fastens something to each of my ears, and presses the cold circle against my chest. “Listen,” he says gravely. “That is the sound of your life.”

Shortly after my fourth birthday we rode in a train away from Brooklyn and never came back. Our new home was in a small town in southern Connecticut, where my bedroom looked down on a backyard with a clothes pole and two crab-apple trees. My father, who worked from an office in our house, struggled at first but gradually established a successful practice, represented in my mind, even then, by our move across town to a tree-shaded house with two porches: an open front porch with wicker chairs and a glider, and a screened back porch with the Brooklyn couch and my grandmother’s armchair with lace doilies. I was a happy child, well liked by my friends, adored by my mother, and encouraged by my father in all my pursuits. My favorite pastimes were collecting minerals, building model ships with masts and rigging, and taking photographs with my own twin-lens reflex that hung on a strap around my neck. I want to emphasize that from the beginning I was a normal, ordinary, well-adjusted boy, without a trace of anything that might account for the fate that lay in store for me. In eighth grade I joined the Science Club and had a crush on Diana Aprilliano. In high school I joined the swim team, learned to ice-skate, and kissed Margaret Mason on the mouth at a Halloween party. In college two things happened to me: I fell in love with a girl I had known in high school, and after a brief flirtation with English literature I switched to pre-med.

With the help of a scholarship and a federal loan I went on to medical school in Boston. Let me be clear: I did not have strange ideas. I did not spend my time brooding over the mysteries of the universe. After a three-year residency I started my own practice, paid off the loan, and married the girl from high school. A year later I put a down payment on a house in our town, not far from the old neighborhood. We were happy for a time, then less happy. There was a miscarriage; after the second one we were told it would be dangerous to try again. She became moody, withdrawn; the joy of life seemed to go out of her. I could feel her floating away, like a balloon on a string that slips through fingers trying to hold on. One day she left to spend a few weeks with her parents in Florida and never returned. After a period of unhappiness I came to understand that it had to be this way. I was able to throw myself into my work and soon became active in community affairs. I even came close to marrying a second time, but something felt wrong, I pulled back at the last moment. Over the next years my practice continued to grow. My friendships remained strong. My health was excellent. Not long after my forty-sixth birthday my father had a triple bypass that left him weak and barely able to walk; he died from a second heart attack six months later. My mother did not survive the year. I sold the family house, consulted a financial advisor, and invested the money in a portfolio of mutual funds and treasury bonds that earned a steady seven and a half percent. At no time did my thoughts take a peculiar turn. My nature was practical. I moved my office to North Main Street and the following summer delivered a series of well-received talks on medicine and morality to the Ethical Culture Society. In this and all other activities I concentrated on the here and now. The riddle of the universe was of less concern to me than the prevention of a flu. I was invited to picnics and dinner parties, widened my circle of friends, and served on the Board of Health and the Regional Planning Commission. At the age of fifty-two I felt almost like a young man. My outlook was hopeful, my income excellent. I began to entertain the idea of marriage again. One evening toward the middle of September I experienced a slight episode of dizziness. I went to bed with a feeling of uneasiness and a heaviness on my chest. I immediately took out my stethoscope and listened to my heart and lungs. As I did so I recalled my father pressing the cold circle against my chest and saying: “That is the sound of your life.” I vowed to stop working so hard, to take some time off; I hadn’t had a vacation in a long time. I soon fell into a restless half sleep.