I. TELEMACHUS AT THE DINNER PARTY
Stately, plump DSA came from the stairhead, a bowl of lather in one fist, lightly asked, in a tone that meant it. Two words, socialism, spoken aloud in the good rooms where the ice cubes never melt fast enough to matter. Behold the trembling upper lip. Behold the sudden interest, so sudden, in property, in propriety, in the propertied properness of things, O rare, O tender is the lawn. Introibo ad altare, said the liberal, unto the god that hath given joy to my portfolio’s youth. Derangement they will call it and syndicate it, DSA Derangement Syndrome, capital letters like a brass plate on a door that leads nowhere, and never once — never — will they say into the good microphone the thing that sits under the tongue like a stone: they ate it. Quietly. At conferences. With good coffee. The old left, the drunks, the cranks, the two-front warriors, gone down the gullet of the polite class one canapé at a time, HR fluent in justice, justice fluent in nothing, and now — now — the bill arrives and there’s nobody downstairs to sign for it, agenbite of inwit, agenbite, agenbite, the party’s very late bill.
II. NESTOR, OR THE HISTORY LESSON NOBODY ASKED FOR
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare 2008 from which I am trying to awake. The machine broke and instead of the dog’s death the rulebook promised it, up it came off the slab, twitching, necromanced on the collective pension, hocus pocus, corpus meum, this is my bailout, given up for you and for many. Bankruptcy was to have cleared the wood. It did not clear the wood. The patient, revived, learned the great extraordinary thing: death is no longer a credible threat at the top of the system, no, not credible, not one bit, watch the banks grow fat as August, watch the housing climb like a drunk on a lamppost, resilience inclusion innovation sustainability, new words for the old suit on the old corpse, walking around Dublin, walking around Wall Street, and everybody — everybody! — calling it healthy. He learned the lesson and he never forgot it: rules are real right up until enforcing them grows inconvenient for the men who wrote them down.
Ineluctable modality of the ownership question: signature of all things I am here to read. Snotgreen sea, scrotumtightening rent. Ladder ladder ladder, and then the ladder isn’t there, teacher lawyer doctor engineer, mobility the anesthetic, mobility the beautiful lie, you didn’t have to own the factory if you could become somebody, and then somebody stopped being available at any price a body could meet.
III. PROTEUS ON THE STRAND, WATCHING THE KELP DIE
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, and the rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Otter, he thought, small unglamorous otter cracking urchins on its floating belly like a stoned raccoon baptized, and who killed the kelp forest, nobody, nobody killed it, they simply stopped needing the otter and on a spreadsheet that looks like nothing at all, it never does, not till you’re standing in the barren, an urchin barren, eighteen months and the cathedral’s gone to bare rock, gone the record store, gone the video clerk who’d make you sit through Tarkovsky for your soul’s improvement, gone the mimeograph, gone the college station broadcasting at the wattage of a dying flashlight to eleven stoned undergraduates who somehow, God knows how, were enough. His footsteps in the sand. A pier is a disappointed bridge. A dam is a disappointed reef, and the water, when the dam goes, does not ask permission about what it drowns next.
Rented rented rented: streaming instead of collecting, subscribing instead of possessing, and some bright bulb in the Alps stood up, nine hundred jets idling on the tarmac like patient horses, and said it out loud and smiled when he said it, you will own nothing, and the smile, Stephen thought, the smile is the detail that keeps a man up nights, agenbite of inwit, that smile.
IV. CALYPSO, OR THE OWNERS AT BREAKFAST
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes, and while he ate he thought of ownership, mildly, the way a man thinks of weather. Who owns the platform. Who owns the land. Who collects the rent, Poldy wondered, buttering, and Molly upstairs still abed, warm yielding welcome, the smell of her lingering, and he thought: mobility was the anesthetic and the anesthetic wore off in this particular kitchen too, particular as any other, and access is not ownership, however you dress it, O rocks, tell us in plain words.
V. CYCLOPS, IN THE PUB, LOUD ABOUT IT
So anyhow the citizen was in the corner shouting about the DSA and the whole lot of them, and says he, they didn’t invent the question, they only wandered into the wreckage of it, and I say to him, says I, sure and who owns the table and the room and the bloody building it’s sitting in, and he near took the head off me with a look, and up spake the citizen: pronouns badges instead of jackboots, says he, sincerity weaponised by its own structural position, storming the Bastille while filing the paperwork to keep the Bastille fully staffed, and by Jesus he wasn’t far wrong, and the whole shop went quiet a minute, quiet as a urchin barren, quiet as a kelp forest with the otter gone.
And then, says the citizen, lowering it, when the old animals wouldn’t die properly, when they went on cracking their shellfish in the open where a body could see them, that’s when the hunting started, and no, not rifles, we’re not savages, we’re professionals, and by the holy this and that they hunted with credentials, with compliance, with funding criteria withdrawn regretfully by email, with leases not renewed, with algorithms that forgot your name overnight, with the soft administrative phrase not the right fit, not the right fit, sings the whole choir of them, and a rifle, says the citizen, a rifle makes a noise, but an institution, God help us, an institution only makes a vacancy, and by Jesus the room went quieter still, quiet as the mobility that used to be the anesthetic and now was only a word men used about traffic.
VI. NAUSICAA ON THE ROCKS, WATCHING THE CENTER CHOOSE
She was seated near her companions on the strand, thinking, and the evening light did be falling soft as the essay’s ending falls, and she knew, the way a girl knows a thing without being told it in words, that the center was never no ideology at all, only the thing it takes to keep an order standing, who holds what, who owes what, who answers to whom, and when the squeeze comes from two directions the center doesn’t split the difference gentle as a maître d’, no, but nor is it written anywhere, nor carved on any tablet, which way it goes, only that some evening, some particular evening not yet arrived, the choice will finally be ownership or order, and the center, whatever it is, whatever it has told itself these fifteen years, will discover on that evening which of the two words it actually meant all along, and not before, and maybe not even then, O the great fall of the deep, deep, deep, and the bill, and the not-knowing.
VII. CIRCE, OR THE BONAPARTOMAT
(Nighttown, but the nighttown is a data center, but the data center is a chapel, but the chapel is a trading floor. The fans overhead keep time like a metronome for something no one composed. THE CITIZEN stands where he always stands. THE VICE-PROVOST is there too, and also not there, and also several vice-provosts, interchangeable, credentialed, humming.)
THE FANS: (in chorus, to no known tune) Op-ti-mize, op-ti-mize, the Lord an offering optimized —
(A server rack unfolds itself, vertebra by vertebra, into a horse. The horse is white. The horse is a spreadsheet. Mounted upon it, small, spurred, bicorne hat blinking a soft blue check where the cockade should be: THE LITTLE CORPORAL, who is also, simultaneously and without embarrassment, an org chart, a Roman bust, a man in a hoodie, a man in a greatcoat, a man in nothing at all, the way a dashboard wears nothing, being only weather for numbers.)
THE LITTLE CORPORAL: (in the voice of a man reading terms of service aloud at his own coronation) Ich dien. I serve. I serve you the way the otter served the kelp, which is to say I am eaten first and thanked never.
(BLOOM’S GIBLETS, still warm from Calypso, rise unbidden from a plate somewhere offstage and arrange themselves into the shape of a ledger. THE VICE-PROVOST tries to eat the ledger. The ledger eats back. Nobody remarks on this. It has the etiquette of weather.)
THE CITIZEN: Who are you at all, small man, small small man?
THE LITTLE CORPORAL: (multiplying — there are three of him now, then one, then none, then one again, each version wearing the last one’s face slightly wrong) I am Buonaparte Buonacompute, First Consul of the Cloud, Emperor of the General Ledger, little father of the little data, Kaiser und Kernel, and also — (bowing, and the bow does not stop, the bow keeps happening, a bow on a loop, a bow that has been A/B tested) — also, simply, the vacancy. You built the doorframe. I am only very good at doors.
(Somewhere the otter surfaces, cracks an urchin, and the crack becomes a gavel, and the gavel becomes a verdict, and the verdict is not yet written but everyone in the room can hear its meter, iambic, patient, coming.)
THE FANS: (louder) Not the right fit, not the right fit, not the ri— (the phrase eats its own tail and becomes a purr, becomes a server hum, becomes almost a lullaby)
A THOUSAND VICE-PROVOSTS: (in unison, though they had agreed on nothing beforehand, though agreement is precisely what has stopped being necessary) We only wanted the machine to stop lying to us.
THE LITTLE CORPORAL: (gently, gently, the way a man gentles a horse he intends to ride to death) Then give me the reins. Give me the reins and I will tell you no more lies. I will tell you no lies at all. I will tell you nothing. I will only sort.
(He raises what is not a sword. It was never going to be a sword. It is a dashboard, and on the dashboard, where a man might once have looked for absolution, a single word blooms red and keeps blooming, the way a bruise blooms, the way ZIRP once bloomed, the way the smile in the Alps once bloomed, smiling, smiling —)
OPTIMIZE.
(And the word is also, Stephen notices, watching from a doorway that keeps changing which century it opens onto, an old word, agenbite of inwit backward, opt-i-mize, opt me in, opt me out, I never opted anything, the form auto-filled itself while I was sleeping —)
THE OLD LEFT: *(rising corpsewise from under the floorboards, in bandages, in mimeograph ink, still arguing with itself even now, even here, thank God, still arguing —) *WHO OWNS —
(But the fans are very loud, and getting louder, and the question, which is the only question, which has always been the only question, goes up into the vents and is filtered, and cooled, and returned to the room as clean, conditioned, unowned air.)
THE LITTLE CORPORAL: (not smiling — the smile was retired three versions ago, deprecated, see changelog — simply nodding, the small economical nod of a motion already carried) Three times I will ask and three times you will answer wrong, and the wrongness will be logged, and the log will be sold, and the sale will be called access, and access will be called freedom, and freedom —
(— becomes, in his mouth, mid-word, a login screen. Everyone in the room, without deciding to, reaches for a password. Nobody remembers setting one. The otter, outside, beyond glass that was never actually there, cracks the last urchin against the last of himself, and does not surface again, and the hunters coming down from the hills are not carrying rifles, were never carrying rifles, are only, gently, gently, carrying keys.)
VIII. PENELOPE’S CLOSING, UNPUNCTUATED, UNBROKEN
yes and I said yes the pronouns were never the argument they were only the smoke and if the fire under them ever gets asked about serious enough to threaten the deed and not just the seating chart well then well then we shall find out in a hurry how much of that liberal commitment was conditional the whole time a permit renewable annually valid only so long as nobody upstairs ever seriously challenged who holds the paper on the building and mobility was the anesthetic he said mobility was the whole trick of it and I never believed him not really not with my whole chest but I believe it now watching the ladder not there where a ladder used to be and I dont know what they’ll choose when it comes to it I dont know and thats the truth of it whatever else is a lie the orchestra’s still playing somebody should go and check the boiler somebody should and maybe nobody will and yes I said yes I dont know yes
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