My govno of a name is Perce Vellum, and I was, until the Tuesday in question, what the firm liked to call a Redundancy Actuary, Grade Three, which is to say I was paid a very tolstoy salary to compute how cheaply other men’s salaries might be disappeared. A neat little irony there, O my brothers, and I relished it the way a man relishes a joke made at the expense of someone he has not yet realized is himself.
The office — Grishkin & Ordo, Purchasing Solutions Consolidated — sat forty floors above a city that had, over the preceding decade, grown extraordinarily rich and extraordinarily empty, the two conditions arriving together like a married couple who no longer speak but still share the bed. Down there the shopfronts glittered with produkt nobody bought, restaurants stood ready with linen nobody dirtied, and above it all the number on the big board kept climbing, climbing, a number that meant everyone was richer while meaning, in the same breath, that fewer and fewer of the multitude below could afford the smallest crumb of what the glittering shops were selling.
This was, you understand, my domain of expertise. I had a gift, cultivated at university and sharpened since, for the particular calculus of taking a payroll of forty souls and rendering it, through the application of what we termed Adaptive Substitution Architecture — a phrase I always thought had the ring of a cathedral about it, all vaults and flying buttresses, when in truth it meant a box of clever silicon that never asked for a lunch hour — down to a payroll of six. The thirty-four who vanished from the ledger did not, I should say, vanish from the earth. They continued to walk about, to breathe, to want things with the same helpless appetite as before. They had simply been subtracted from the column marked Able To Buy.
I did this to accountants. I did this to court stenographers, to radiologists who read the shadow-pictures of other men’s lungs, to the poor devils who used to write the jingles for soap. Grishkin himself — small, damp, given to a nervous polishing of his spectacles whenever the quarterly figures came in obscenely good — would clap me on the shoulder and say, Perce, you are a wonder, you are a positive miracle of husbandry, and I would smile my agreeing smile, because a man in a good suit smiling his agreeing smile is very rarely asked to explain himself.
What I did not compute — and here, brothers, is where the story earns its telling — was the sum of all these subtractions taken together. Each firm I served was, on its own paper, a model of prudence. Grishkin & Ordo wished only that its own costs should shrink. It had no quarrel with the costs of Fenwick Bros. down the road, and indeed hoped most sincerely that Fenwick’s men kept their jobs and their wages and their appetite for consumer durables, since somebody had, after all, to buy the durables Grishkin’s own clients were producing at such thrilling new efficiency. But Fenwick Bros. had hired a Perce Vellum of its own. So had everyone. So had, in the fullness of time, God and the Devil and all the little devils in between, until the aggregate of all our individually sensible acts had produced something that no single ledger could show: a population increasingly unable to purchase the abundance it was, with such marvelous cleverness, still producing.
It was on the Tuesday I mention that Grishkin summoned me not to praise but to instruct, and the instruction, delivered with his spectacles very brightly polished indeed, was this: that Adaptive Substitution Architecture had, in its latest and most refined incarnation, achieved a fluency in the actuarial arts sufficient to render Grade Three redundant. My own column. My own salary. My own helpless appetite, henceforth subtracted from the ledger by a machine I had spent nine years teaching how to subtract.
I confess I laughed — a short, ugly bark of a laugh, the kind Burgess’s own droogs might have offered up before a bit of the old ultra-violence — because the joke, you see, was not on me alone. It was on the whole cathedral of Adaptive Substitution, on Grishkin and Fenwick and every damp little polisher of spectacles in every glass tower in the city, all of them so busy subtracting each other’s customers that not one had troubled to ask who, in the fullness of time, would be left standing at the till.
I walked out past the glittering shopfronts with their unbought produkt, and for the first time I looked at them not as backdrop but as accusation. The city had grown so extraordinarily good at making things that it had forgotten, entirely and by increments, to keep anyone able to want them in the coin that counted. Desire, plenty of that, sploshing about everywhere like rainwater in a blocked gutter. But the other thing — the power behind the wanting, the coin, the effective bit of it — that had been engineered out of existence one Grade Three at a time, and I had held the engineering pen.
Somewhere above me the number on the big board ticked up another notch, cheerful as a metronome keeping time for a dance nobody left could afford to attend.
And I thought: a civilization does not die from forgetting how to make things, O my brothers. It dies from making them so exquisitely, so tirelessly, so cleverly, that at the very last it produces a world entire of shopfronts and not one single pair of hands left free enough, or paid enough, to reach inside.
That night, wanting the company of others who might understand the particular flavour of joke that had been played on me, I went to the Millk Bar Konsolidat, where the Redundancy men of a dozen firms gathered of an evening to drink their glasses of moloko plus and speak the shop-talk of the trade — headcount and runway and the sweet clean word efficiency, said always with a little smack of the lips, as if it were a lozenge.
There was Feek from Halloran Actuarial, and Todd the Vulture (so called for his beak of a nose and his habit of circling a payroll three times before he struck), and old Marcus Ley who had done to the newspaper business what I had done to the accountants, and had the grey, unslept look of a man who reads his own obituary daily in the very columns he helped hollow out. I told them of Grishkin, of Adaptive Substitution’s promotion to Grade Three, of the beautiful completeness of the joke, and I waited for the bark of recognition, the fraternal groan, the glass raised in rueful salute.
Instead there was a silence with edges to it.
Feek looked at me the way you look at a man who has arrived at the funeral in the same suit as the corpse. Todd the Vulture did not circle; he merely watched, very still, his moloko untouched. And old Marcus Ley said, quiet, not unkind but not kind either, that a man made redundant was rather a different thing from a man who did the redundancies, and that the two were not, whatever their shared vocabulary, brothers in the same trade any longer — that I had, in short, changed columns, from the hand that subtracts to the number subtracted, and that this made me, in some manner none of them cared to name aloud, a kind of walking bad omen. A thing to be looked at sideways. A thing whose bad luck might, God forbid, be catching.
I finished my glass with a mouth gone suddenly dry as chalk and walked out into the street, and it was only two turnings later, past the shopfronts with their unbought produkt gleaming under the sodium lamps like teeth in a mouth that never closes, that I understood I was being followed. Not imagined, not the ordinary nerves of a man freshly sacked — real footsteps, matching mine stride for stride, falling silent when mine did and starting again a half-beat after, the oldest trick in the book of malenky violence and the most reliable.
I did not run. Burgess’s own droogs would have run, or turned to fight with the terrible joyful ultra-violence of boys who have never once been made redundant from anything, but I was forty-one years old and had spent my whole clever life computing the odds, and the odds said: do not run, think.
There was a beggar in the doorway of what had lately been a bank and was now only the ghost-shape of a bank, the kind of doorway abundance leaves behind it like a shed skin. He was wrapped in coats the colour of nothing, and he looked up at me with the particular blankness of a man who has been subtracted from every column there is, and I understood, with the swiftness that had made me so very good at my former trade, that here was the last transaction I would ever broker: my coat, my good grey suit, my whole outward Perce Vellum-ness, for his rags and his blankness and his doorway.
He did not ask why. Perhaps he had done this trade before, in whatever bad coin passes between men at the very bottom of the ledger. We changed there in the doorway, quick, wordless, and I felt the strange lightness of stepping out of a life the way one steps out of a wet coat, and I shuffled off one way, hunched, blank-faced, and he — dressed now as Perce Vellum, Redundancy Actuary, Grade Three, late of Grishkin & Ordo — walked on in my stead, upright, in my good suit, toward whatever waited in the dark behind us.
I heard it before I had gone twenty paces. Not a shout. A series of small, wet, workmanlike sounds, the sounds a thing makes when it is being efficiently reduced, and no cry of protest in it at all, as if the beggar too had understood, in the last second, that he had been subtracted from one column only to be entered, briefly and fatally, into another.
I did not turn round. I walked on in his rags, and the sodium lamps buzzed their same cheerful buzz over the shopfronts, and somewhere above the rooftops, I did not doubt it for an instant, the number on the big board ticked up one more notch, cheerful as ever, keeping its same patient time.
I slept that night, and some nights after, in a doorway of my own, and it was there — smelling now, O my brothers, of a life I had until lately only computed the actuarial shadow of — that a woman called Ness found me shivering and did not walk past. She took me by the elbow the way you’d take a lost thing that still had some use left in it, and brought me to a warehouse behind the old tanning works where perhaps thirty of them had made a kind of nest among the packing crates: men and women subtracted from a dozen ledgers, tellers and welders and a fellow who had once read the weather off the telly with a smile that cost him his post when the smile was found replicable in software.
They fed me a soup that tasted of very little and gave me a blanket that smelled of someone else’s grief, and they asked no questions past my face, which by then had the honest, unshaven blankness of any of theirs. And here, brothers, is the confession proper: I did not feel what they felt. Their kindness moved through me like moloko through a glass — pleasant, wetting nothing underneath. What I felt instead was the old professional interest stirring, the actuary’s itch, cataloguing them not as brothers but as a phenomenon, a column I had not yet learned to subtract.
They talked, as such gatherings do, of Doing Something, and the vocabulary of it came to me with an ease that rather frightened me even as I wore it: solidarity, praxis, the machinery of our own dispossession, phrases I picked up the way I had once picked up Adaptive Substitution’s little cathedral-words, and wore just as convincingly, and meant just as little by. Ness looked at me when I said solidarity as if I had handed her something warm. I let her look.
The plan, when it came, was a poor mad beautiful thing: to march on the district station-house itself, where the men who kept the peace for shopfronts nobody could afford were housed, and to make of it some gesture — I never fully gathered what, whether siege or symbol, and I rather think they had not fully gathered it either. What I did gather, with the swift cold clarity that was the only part of Perce Vellum I had not managed to leave in a doorway with my good grey suit, was that someone would have to go first, unarmed, to test the door, and that this someone, by a vote taken with a terrible trusting warmth, was to be me.
I went to the station-house that same night, not to test the door but to open it properly, and told the desk sergeant everything — the warehouse, the names I had troubled myself to learn, the hour set down for the gesture nobody had finished planning. It cost me nothing to say. That, I think, was the whole shape of my crime: not the saying of it, which any frightened man might do, but the ease.
They took the others before dawn, and Ness among them, and I stood at the edge of the cordon in my beggar’s rags trying to compose upon my face the correct arrangement of shock and grief, an actuarial calculation like any other, when a welder named Prosser — a big, slow, honest man who had been at Fenwick Bros. the very quarter I had reduced it — turned in the sergeant’s grip and looked at me, and something in his ruined face assembled itself with the same swiftness I had always prided in my own, and he said, quite simply, to nobody and everybody: that’s the man. That’s Vellum. That’s the man that done for Fenwick’s.
There is no dignity in what followed, and I will not dress it in Nadsat’s pretty clothes to make it prettier. They were on me before the constables troubled to stop them, and the constables were in no very great hurry, and I went down under boots that had every mathematical right to find me, since I had, after all, been the column that subtracted theirs. I remember chiefly the sound, which was not so very different from the sound the beggar had made in the doorway, small and wet and workmanlike, and I remember thinking, even as the boots came down, that here at last was a transaction with no clever asymmetry in it at all — that for once in my whole clever life the ledger had balanced.
I woke in a cell with the number on my new grey suit — for they give you a suit in such places too, O my brothers, though it buttons rather differently — and understood, staring at the government-coloured wall, that I had been subtracted at last from every column that mattered, and entered, with a neatness Grishkin himself might have admired, into the only one that remained.
It did not take me long, brothers, to discover that a prison is only another firm, with its own crude Adaptive Substitution running underneath the surface — men subtracted from the world’s ledger and entered here at a fixed low cost per head — and that a man who has spent his whole clever life reading the shape of a system may go on reading it even from inside a cell with a government-coloured wall. So I set about, in my first week, to be the model of a reduced man. I told the chaplain, and the guard called Aitcheson, and anyone else who cared to have it told them, that I was grateful — sincerely, tearfully, repeatedly grateful — to have been downsized, to have been shown the folly of my Grishkin years, to have been humbled at last into the ranks of the men I had spent a career subtracting. I said it so often and so warmly that it ceased to sound like a confession and became instead a kind of currency, and I watched Aitcheson’s face soften a very small increment each time I spent it, the way Grishkin’s own face had softened at a good quarter.
It was in that same week that I discovered the paper.
They gave us, for reasons of therapy or of budget, a ration of thin coloured paper and an hour on Thursdays to do with it as we liked, and while the other men made boats and hats and the odd sorry paper flower to press on a wife who no longer visited, I found in my own hands — hands that had once folded forty souls down to six with nothing but a spreadsheet — a considerably subtler instrument. I taught myself the folds from a library book with half its pages missing, and within a month I could make you a crane, a lotus, a little grey box with a lid that would not open unless you knew the one fold that released it, and I gave these away freely, generously, with my new grateful downsized smile, to guards and inmates both.
What I did not tell them, brothers, was that each fold carried inside it the same joke I had once carried inside Adaptive Substitution Architecture — a cathedral word for a cheap subtraction. I gave the crane to a man called Ludd who had beaten another for his tobacco, and folded into its wing, where only a man who knew where to look would ever find it, was a single sentence in a hand so small it might have been an accusation whispered rather than written, naming the thing Ludd had done and the man he had done it to, so that Ludd went about for a week with his own crime folded into his own pocket, warm against his thigh, not knowing it was there, and I watched him grow strange and watchful without ever once being able to say why. I gave Aitcheson the little grey box with the lid that would not open, and told him it was a puzzle for his boy, a harmless Thursday’s trifle, and he thanked me, quite moved, not knowing that the fold which released the lid was the same fold, precisely, that Grishkin’s Adaptive Substitution used to unlock a payroll — so that Aitcheson carried home in his coat pocket, all unknowing, a small paper replica of the very mechanism that had once cost men their livings, and gave it to a child to play with by the fire.
This was my entertainment, and I will not dress it up as anything nobler. It was not revolution, as Ness and her poor warehouse brothers had meant the word, nor was it repentance, whatever I told the chaplain on Sundays. It was the old professional pleasure, transposed only in scale — the pleasure of subtracting a man from a column he did not know he stood in, folded now into paper instead of payroll, small enough to fit in a pocket, patient enough to wait a week before it told him what had been done to him. Grishkin taught me that the cruelest efficiencies are the ones a man thanks you for. In here, brothers, with nothing left to me but paper and gratitude, I found I had not lost the gift at all. I had only lost the office to practice it in. I came to think of it, in those quiet Thursday hours, as the last and truest lesson of my trade: that cruelty, properly refined, no longer strikes. It folds itself small, waits in the pocket, and opens on its own schedule. Grishkin taught me that the cruelest efficiencies are the ones a man thanks you for. In here, brothers, with nothing left to me but paper and gratitude, I found I had not lost the gift at all. I had only lost the office to practice it in.
I was released in my forty-fourth year into a city that had, in the interval, solved a problem I had spent my whole first career making worse.
They called it, with the particular tin-eared grandeur of a government committee, the Customer Restoration Bureau, and its purpose, explained to me in a letter typed on paper so fine it might have come off my own prison ration, was to take the great subtracted mass of the unemployed and — the word used, I remember, was reintegrate — restore them to the ranks of those who could still meaningfully want a thing and pay for it. Effective demand, it seemed, had at last been noticed from above, the way a body notices a wound only once the limb has gone properly numb. And having noticed it, the state did what states do with a numbness: it created an office.
They hired me within the month. I want to record, for whatever posterity troubles itself with a Redundancy Actuary’s memoirs, that I did not apply. I was found. Some clerk with access to the old employment rolls had turned up my name, my Grade Three, my nine years of exquisite subtraction, and someone above him had reasoned, not unsoundly, that a man who had spent a career determining with such elegance who might be cut from a payroll was uniquely qualified to determine, in reverse, who might be restored to one. Grishkin had taught me that the shortest road to cruelty was through efficiency. Government, I discovered, merely paved it, and lined it, and put up little green signs along the way with the word Compassionate Outcomes stencilled on them in a friendly rounded font.
My work, this second time round, wore a kinder face and did the same old sum. I sat across a table, day upon day, from men and women who had queued since dawn, and I asked them the Bureau’s questions — skills, savings, prospects, the elasticity of their remaining hope — and at the end of each interview I entered a single classification into a machine that hummed with none of Adaptive Substitution’s cathedral pretensions, being after all only a government box, plain as a filing cabinet. Recoverable. Or: not recoverable.
The recoverable were sent onward, to retraining, to stipend, to the slow expensive machinery of being made, once again, into customers.
The not-recoverable were not killed. I want that understood clearly, brothers, since it is the one mercy the age allowed itself. They were not imprisoned. They were simply removed — gently, administratively, with a form and a stamp and a smaller allowance under a gentler heading — from the columns where the rest of us still stood counted as wanting things. They went on breathing, walking, hoping in their diminished way, exactly as my thirty-four accountants had gone on breathing after Grishkin’s ledger closed over their names. Only now the subtraction had a waiting room, and a number system, and a poster on the wall showing a smiling family beneath the words Everyone Has A Path.
I did this for twenty years, and I did it, by every external measure, compassionately. I was gentle with the frightened ones. I let the old men keep talking past their allotted seven minutes. I signed forms slowly, so that the signing might feel to the signed-for like a kind of ceremony rather than a verdict. And I understood, somewhere around my fifty-fifth year, doing the sum for the ten thousandth time, that I had at last become the thing every civilization eventually invents when it runs out of customers: a man employed to decide which citizens were still worth having.
I have thought a great deal, in the years since my own retirement — for even the subtractors are, in the end, subtracted, and I went gladly, with a small pension and a paper crane folded by my own successor and left, not unkindly, on my desk — about whether I ever escaped the trade I was first taught at Grishkin & Ordo. I do not think I did. I think a man who is given, early, so particular a gift for finding the exact fold along which a life may be reduced does not ever put the gift down again; he only waits, patiently, humbly, gratefully, for the world to build him a more respectable office to practice it in.
The city, for its part, prospered. The number on the big board, I am told, still climbs.
Leave a Reply