Waiting for the Galactic Bus (26 page)

BARION
TO
COYUL
:
I
SAY
QUIT
NOW
.
WHY
MAKE
A
FEDERAL
CASE
?

COYUL
TO
BARION
:
YOUR
KNOWLEDGE
OF
WOMEN
STILL
NEOLITHIC
.
SUBJECT
LOOSENED
UP
BUT
NOT
YET
RESTRUCTURED
.
PRESENTLY
AS
LIABLE
TO
FALL
IN
LOVE
WITH
JUDAS
AS
WOODY
BARNES
OR
ANYONE
ELSE
.
BESIDES
,
I
’
M
BEGINNING
TO
LIKE
THE
LASS
.

BARION
TO
COYUL
:
PSYCHOBABBLJNG
SENTIMENTALIST
.

COYUL
TO
BARION
:
NEXT
TO
VIOLENCE
I
REALLY
HATE
DIRTY
LANGUAGE
.

    28   

Everyone comes to the Banal

A week without Paladins assured Charity that her trail was cold. She relaxed into the humdrum of the Club Banal, which combined all the functions Jake listed. There was the bar, built in the Tijuana-Juarez style of the late’40s, with rickety tables and a brass ensemble that played interminably. Just off the bar down an atmospherically dim passage were the brothel rooms. Behind this vigorously active function lay BSA (Below Stairs Accounting, office of), a huge open space like five airplane hangars end to end. From the entrance, BSA receded into a dim infinity of desks, workers, the
chitter-clatter-ting!
of office machines and the asthmatic buzz of government phones obsolete in 1960.

“What do they do here?” Charity asked Elvira Grubb, who conducted her introductory tour.

“I’m not sure, lamb. No one is.”

If the function of BSA remained obscure, the people were more than familiar to Charity, like the VA and post office workers at home. They filed into the bar on their breaks to hunch over the tables in disconsolate huddles, bawling at each other over the deafening music. None of them could tell Charity Stovall what BSA ultimately produced, being employed strictly on a need-to-know basis. They needed to know very little and were not at all curious about the end product. They processed mountains of paperwork, all requiring triplication and interoffice memos, listless, disinterested and permanently dissatisfied. Since time meant nothing, the smallest mistake in the endless lists of numbers and names jarred the Leviathan process off its treadmill track. Back came whole Himalayas of completed lists for checking, recopying, rechecking, review and countersigning once again. Conversations in the bar centered obsessively on who made the most mistakes, who was getting kicked upstairs or who was next in line for promotion. They endured a grinding, low-grade misery but no one ever left except to visit the girls.

“They could leave anytime,” Elvira told her, “but no one ever does.”

The whole thing seemed pointless to Charity. “Gol-lee, why would the Devil make up such a wimpy kind of punishment?”

“Bless you, child, the Prince doesn’t punish anyone any more than I do. They brought all this with them.” Elvira Grubb had a comfortable, sensual laugh and the relaxed plumpness of a woman come to middle years by an enjoyable road. Her life, she felt, had been marvelous and death was even better. “I take care of things and water the drinks and — if I do say so — give the establishment what decorum it possesses. My husband is an eminent critic and friend to the Prince. Did I tell you that Mrs. Lincoln was a confidante of mine?” Elvira had, more than once. “She didn’t deserve her bad reputation in Washington society. Let me tell you, that husband of hers was not an easy man to live with. You watch out for these humanitarians. Someone close wants a little affection, they’re always off loving Mankind. Now, Wilmer is a perfect husband. A real bear cat.”

And off she’d go, telling once more of her romantic marriage while Charity tried to enjoy her diet cola and found she could no longer stomach anything so insipid.

“Give me a bourbon straight up, please?” said the suddenly needful Charity. “This stuff tastes like these people look.”

True, gray and unhappy as they were, no one left the club or the accounting office. They hung over the tables or the bar, complaining about the petty but endless injustices of civil service or what hell should really be, but no one really tried to change anything.

“Why should they when it’s all so nice and steady and safe?” Elvira philosophized from her high desk between the bar and the annexed house of qualified joy. “Babies always rattle their cribs, but they wouldn’t be comfy anywhere else, I say. The girls are fantasy... Good evening, Mr. Pugh! Nice to see our regulars, go right up. Domination on the second floor, same as always... Where was I?”

“The girls are sad as the office.” Charity swirled the swizzle stick in her bourbon. “And those old ladies up in Accounting. Work, work, work, and once a week, big deal, they put on an awful hat with fake flowers, and go across the street where there’s girl waitresses and fancy cocktail napkins and get blind. They sweep’em out in shifts.”

This was also true. The retrieval of genteel and very blitzed old ladies from the lounge across the street was a cottage industry in itself.

“Never mind.” Elvira stuck to her point. “Whatever they dreamed, this is all they ever really wanted and the office is all they ever got. Used to it. Be scared to death of anything else.”

You get what you pay for,
Charity knew
, which means what you can afford, and you get used to that. Even me, my big night, the first night of my really being a woman, and what do I look back to? The White Rose Motel, which it was probably built by the same people thought up this place.

One worker, mired in the quicksand of Accounting, was still defiant Leon Pebbles was thin, red-eyed and always looked slightly feverish. Leon went an extra mile to do his job well and to search out ways to improve efficiency. Naturally his co-workers hated his guts.

“They don’t want efficiency,” he grieved to Charity. “They’re afraid of it.”

For his integrity, Leon lived on the Cross. Much table kvetch centered on his wild-hair schemes to cut down paperwork, which would mean less employment. His memos were few, brief and lucid, heretical to calcified supervisors who saw ruin in their comprehensibility.

“He don’t read the Style Manual. You don’t
begin,
you
implement.
You don’t
rush,
you
expedite.
Pebbles is a square peg in a round hole.”

“But what are we
doing?”
Leon lamented to Charity over his mineral water and ulcer tablets. He didn’t need the pills since his death, but they were habit, like his compulsive efficiency. “Nothing, that’s what. Pounding sand down a rat hole, and the less they do, the longer the job description.”

Heads turned at the bar: Pebbles had spoken a taboo word. In this area Leon was Judas himself to other workers. Lengthy memos were always coming down from somewhere to be read, initialed and passed on. Never less than ten single-spaced pages, they boiled down to the need for efficiency and cutting paperwork. To keep one’s job from going under the ax, one’s function must be represented as vital, complex and sufficiently incomprehensible to dazzle the job analysts. Trash burners alone, Leon’s department, became End Product Evaluation Engineers with job descriptions couched in syntax that defied translation —

— conceive, establish and maintain an effective system of end product evaluation and final action implementation of same... (see para. 27a above).

Not so the traitor Pebbles, who, throwing caution and the Manual to the winds, was brash enough to write:
All material comes to me in large bundles, which I bag and burn. There are twenty-five of us to do this where ten would be enough
.

A marked and friendless man. Bloody but unbowed, Leon prophesied to Charity

with Old Testament wrath: “Someday, the Lord’s anger and just plain COMMON SENSE, by God, is going to reach down and rewrite every by God job description in this dead-ass place. BOOM! You wait.”

Leon plodded back to his job, threading his way through the tables, glowering at the sludge in the wheels of progress. “Just wait... boom.”

The band played on, workers muttered into their watered drinks. Barion sent more agitated messages to his brother —

BARION
TO
COVUL
:
ADVISE
.
READY
YET
?

COYUL
TO
BARION
:
NOT
.
WILL
NOT
OPEN
UNREHEARSED
.

BARION
TO
COYUL
:
HURRY
REPEAT
HURRY
.
IF
SUSPICIONS
CORRECT
,
OUR
TYPE
ENERGY
FORMS
WITHIN
SOLAR
SYSTEM
,
GROWING
STRONGER
.

COYUL
TO
BARION
:
YOU
MEAN
WE
CAN
GO
HOME
?

BARION
TO
COYUL
:
YOU
UNBELIEVABLE
ASS
,
I
AM
TALKING
ABOUT
JUDGMENT
DAY
.
OURS
.
VERY
LITERAL
AND
VERY
NEAR
.
HURRY
.

    29