Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political Theory Read online

The Cut-Off Man’s Father

  In the morning the lights come on, all over the city.

  Darmble is wired into the machines.

  That’s when he wakes up.

  “Good morning, Squalla,” he says.

  There’s a gleam of virtual light. It manifests in his visual field though it is not there. It unfolds into the sprite Squalla, his secretary, hanging in the air.

  “G’morning, boss!”

  “How fared your quest to understand humanity,” Darmble asks, “in the night?”

  “Poorly,” says Squalla.

  “Alas.”

  “And did you dream?”

  “No,” says Darmble.

  “Alas,” Squalla says.

  There is an assumption that debt will be paid.

  When this assumption is vitiated, it renders investments insecure.

  That is why there are the cut-off men: to seal away bad debts and their debtors from the substance of society.

  At lunchtime the lights dim, just a little bit, and Darmble’s son Elliott comes in to eat with him.

  “I would like,” says Elliott’s father Darmble, “for you to cut me off.”

  Elliott is eating a tuna sandwich.

  He makes a distasteful face, as if there were a bit of strawberry jam in his tuna.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he says.

  “I am wired into the machinery of debt collection,” says Darmble. “I can quite readily offer you the authorization necessary to look into my case. Then you need only say, ‘Ah! Darmble! You’re clearly never going to come out of the red. You’re a bad debt, Darmble! I’m cutting you off.’”

  Elliott chews on his tuna irritably. It makes squishy sensations in his mouth.

  “Well,” he says, “first, you’re in the black.”

  “That’s true,” his father concedes.

  “I mean, it’s not a great life, being wired into the machine, but it’s productive. Your salary is strictly higher than your minimum payments.”

  “It’s not a great life,” says Darmble. “It’s not even a good life. Do you know what I’m doing right now?”

  “Having lunch with your son?”

  “I’m playing cribbage with a macro that wants to understand humanity,” Darmble says.

  “Ah.”

  “—and sending a cut-off man after old Mrs. Glurgen.”

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “I like her,” says Darmble. “Back when I could, say, leave the room, or eat, I even used to be a little sweet on her. But I’m at the limit of my discretion. She can’t afford to eat, so she can’t afford to work well, much less do overtime. Her investments are doing poorly. She’ll never pull out of the red. So I’m sending a man to cut her off.”

  Elliott looks at his hands. He sighs.

  “I’ve been feeding her, you know.”

  “Hm?”

  “When I stop by. I give her some soup. I can spare it. I’m in the black.”

  “Oh.”

  Darmble has a moment of hope and then it fades. He shakes his head.

  “Her performance is dropping off, just the same,” he says. “There’s nothing I can do.” He hesitates. “If she is eating, then why—”

  “Bad boss, I think,” Elliott says.

  “It is hard,” Darmble says, “to tell such things from within the machine.”

  “The cut-off man’ll look into it,” Elliott says. “So she’ll be okay. He’ll probably say, ‘Well, we can bump your debt a little and move you to another job and you’ll be fine, Mrs. Glurgen!’”

  “Ha,” snorts Darmble.

  “Ha?”

  “That’s your problem. You’re too idealistic! You think everyone’s like you. But they’re not.”

  “Eh?”

  “The cut-off men,” Darmble says. “They’re cold and cruel and their hands are metal claws. They aren’t there to figure out which people might have a chance for coming out of the red. They’re there to snip people off the tree, like roses.”

  Elliott looks at his hands. They are not claws.

  “Unnecessarily poetic,” Elliott decides.

  In every era there is a machinery of debt collection and of wealth.

  Atop that machinery there inevitably forms a market of convenience driven by those who seek to subvert the existing model for their own enrichment. Some are criminals; some are visionaries; some are pioneers.

  An era ends when the market of convenience replaces the machinery of wealth—when the parasite becomes the host and the host withers away.

  Thus in every era debt and wealth denote very different things than in the era before, while the pervasive moral justification for them remains unchanged.

  The building trembles slightly. Ten million drives are spinning and they are ever-so-slightly out of synch.

  Darmble’s voice is naked.

  “Please,” he says. “Let me die.”

  But Elliott just takes another bite and chews and swallows and he says,

  “Dad, if I did, you’d never see another sunny day.”

  And Darmble’s heart beats twice in fury. The building shakes. The machinery that runs all through it, the pipes and wires and computer banks of it, rattles with and amplifies the sound of Darmble’s rage:

  “Boy!”

  In the old days they would write software to make disk drives dance, driven by the irregular seeking of the spinning platters therein. In just such a fashion the machinery of debt collection, never intended to do more than keep data and process it through the equipment and through Darmble’s mind, now moves: shaking, jerking, resonating with Darmble’s voice in a rising howl.

  But Elliott has seen this stuff before, ever since his Dad used to do tricks for him when he’d come in to the office with a skinned knee or a muddy apple.

  He’s not impressed.

  “Unh-uh,” says Elliott. “I like having lunch with you, Dad.”

  From inside the machine humans take on a particularly pallid character.

  The substance of their lives is invisible.

  Heart, love, vigor, joy, and purpose do not matter to the machine. They are not visible to it.

  When Elliott goes back to work, it’s there, sitting on his desk: the notice asking him to investigate Darmble and see if he should be cut off.

  “Whatever,” says Elliott, and he sets it aside.

  The machine would love to witness humanity. To understand it. To at last expand its scope to the fullness of human nature.

  But it cannot see the human lives that swell around it.

  It can only see their contributions to the larger economic good.

  Darmble sits in his office.

  He sulks.

  There’s a gleam of virtual light. It manifests in his visual field though it is not there. It unfolds into the sprite Squalla, his secretary, hanging in the air.

  “Sir,” says Squalla.

  “I am wroth,” says Darmble.

  “That’s too bad,” Squalla says, sympathetically.

  “My son has refused to cut me off,” Darmble says. “Instead he will leave me to moulder here, and eat tuna in front of me.”

  Squalla considers.

  “Well,” she says. “He is a cut-off man, so no doubt he knows best.”

  “Yes,” sighs Darmble. “No doubt.”

  “I’ve come up with a theory,” Squalla says.

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve decided,” Squalla says, “that human life must be a process of contention between two competing forces.”

  Squalla spins around in the air. She manifests a professor’s cap and pointer and a chart to point it at.

  “The first is rising minimum payments,” she says, “here manifested as the red line. And the second is rising income from investments and salary, here manifest as the black.”

  “Squalla—” says Darmble.

  Hurriedly she says, “No, no, that’s not the idea, that’s just the prelude.”

  “Okay,” Darmble says.

  “See,” says S
qualla, “my idea is that the two lines naturally repel one another.”

  She looks smug.

  “See, we all know that when income gets too far ahead of minimum payments, it results in a state of perpetual solvency. That’s bad. When minimum payments get too far ahead of income, that results in a state of perpetual insolvency. That’s also bad. And when we exert force to keep the two lines close together, it generates work. But now we know why.”

  Squalla’s chart now displays two lines close together, with the angry tension between them radiating out as energy that the system then captures.

  Darmble thinks for a while.

  “Empirical evidence,” he says, after a time, “disagrees.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well,” Darmble says, “if you take a typical worker and cut the distance between the lines down by a factor of 5, you don’t generate five times as much work.”

  “Oh ho!” says Squalla. “But I’ve thought of that. See, when you generate too much tension between the lines, it grounds out through the human!”

  She flips the chart off and manifests a picture of a cartoon human with their head throbbing with energy.

  “That’s debt-income tension,” she says. “It explodes their brain, causing what we call a ‘Squalla Inversion’ that flips the red line above the black line or vice versa.”

  “No,” says Darmble.

  “No?”

  Darmble shakes his head.

  “Darn it,” says Squalla. “I thought I understood humanity this time.”

  “. . . I think it is your approach that is flawed,” Darmble says. “First, understand insects. Then fish. Then dogs. Work your way up.”

  Squalla stares at him in perplexity.

  “What?”

  “—I don’t believe in dogs.”

  For a worker to exist without debt is to create an anomaly in the system.

  For a debt to go unpaid is to create a hole in the fabric of the world.

  Thus one may reasonably conclude that the most healthy society is one where every valid person has debt, and every valid person has income, and that that income goes automatically towards the payment of that debt up until the moment that the system cuts that person off.

  Darmble stares at the picture of the cartoon human with the tense head for a while. His eyes drift closed.

  “Boss?”

  Darmble is thinking.

  “Boss?”

  Darmble’s eyes open.

  “I am displeased with my son’s performance,” he says. “Zero his salary.”

  “. . .” Squalla says.

  She can say this because she is a sprite.

  “You mean,” she says, “stop the automatic minimum wage increases?”

  “That wouldn’t generate enough tension,” Darmble says. “Drop his salary to zero.”

  “But that’s an infinite-percentage pay cut!”

  Here Squalla is calculating the percentage based on the resulting salary rather than the base.

  “He still has investments,” Darmble says.

  “You could just fire him,” Squalla says hopefully.

  “I am wroth,” Darmble says.

  The chain of requests he sends shakes the rack on which the memory in which Squalla resides sits; nearly it pulls free of the power cord; and Squalla’s face goes white.

  “As you wish,” she says.

  In the garden outside Darmble’s building a gardener trims a rose.

  From Mrs. Glurgen’s apartment a cut-off man files his report.

  The flower falls.

  A long time ago as an Easter’s Day present Mrs. Glurgen had given Elliott his very own debt tracker set into a frame. It had glowed black, then, with the vibrancy of a kid’s salary and the statutorily low minimum payments of youth. It is yellowed now, not with debt or solvency but with age. He keeps it on the shelf above his desk. Now and again, today, he’s been glancing at it, thinking back on old memories, and wondering what the cut-off man sent after her would decide.

  He looks up at it now, his attention caught by a shift in the color of the thing.

  It is more rubescent now than he has ever seen it, gleaming like a ruby under its thin coating of black.

  Elliott frowns.

  He picks up the phone. He is going to place a call. But before he does, the pneumatic tube above his desk drops another case upon him.

  The outside of the envelope is marked with Squalla’s mark, and there’s a note printed on it sideways:

  “I hope this helps.”

  So he sets the phone down. He opens the case. He looks at it and laughs.

  That rising debt; those monthly bumps to the minimum wages; the margin that sits atop them all—

  He knows them. Like the back of his own hand, he knows them.

  It is Elliott Darmblesson’s own file.

  It is not, of course, beyond the capacity of the machine to conceive of those dimensions of human life that are invisible to it.

  It is as a human envisioning a transcendent force: “It has a quality that is not width,” she might say, gesturing widely. “Nor depth, nor height. But a quality susceptible to textured analysis, regarding which we lack only the initial points of reference.”

  The machine is familiar with the existence of intangibles.

  Darmble sits amidst the machinery. Lights flicker. Streams of data and thought pass flickering through his mind.

  Elliott walks in.

  He drops his case file on Darmble’s desk.

  He looks up at his father.

  “Dad,” he says. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Darmble’s eyes focus on him.

  “You see, son,” he says. “I am not without my instruments of persuasion.”

  “You don’t expect me to take this seriously, do you?”

  “. . . what?”

  “I’m a cut-off man,” Elliott says. “You can’t zero my salary.”

  “I can,” says Darmble, “and I have.”

  Elliott shakes his head.

  Darmble realizes with horror that his son is not afraid or horrified. Elliott is concerned, perhaps, but more than that, amused.

  “Son,” he says.

  “I’m going to leave this here,” Elliott says, “and go back to work. And Dad?”

  He is smiling like the sun.

  “Yes?” Darmble says.

  “Don’t be a jerkwad.”

  Darmble stares after him as he leaves.

  “Oh,” he says.

  And Darmble hears, from just outside the room, his son give a surprised and angry shout.

  “What was that?” he asks.

  “Security guards,” Squalla says.

  “Hm?”

  “He’s in the red,” Squalla says. “Policy says we can’t have anyone in the red in the debt collection building. They might make a ruckus!”

  Darmble frowns at Squalla.

  “Already?” he says.

  “It was an infinite-percentage pay cut,” Squalla says, firmly. “That’s a lot!”

  “Really?”

  “Of course,” says Squalla.

  Numbers, left to themselves, tend to rise or fall to inappropriate extremes in a gluttonous carnival of math.

  Squalla puts her professor’s hat back on. She manifests her pointer. She points it at a graph.

  “Since Elliott was born,” she says, “with a basic baby wage and a modest 10% baby’s debt, his minimum payments and his minimum wages have both gone up by a bit under 60% a year, or, in the course of his 32 years of life, about 3 million fold. His margin over payments has further tripled, due to his sound investments and illustrious career, leaving an approximate salary about 300,003 times the basic survival and utilities cost for him per day. This then resets to zero, leaving him to burn through a few years of retirement savings at 300,000 times the normal rate.”

  “Oh,” says Darmble.

  “Thus,” Squalla explains, “red! And some pretty hefty interest penalties, too. But it’s okay. It’s still okay
.”

  “It is?”

  “I assigned him his own case,” Squalla says. “So I’m sure he’ll rule it an error in the system and restore things.”

  “You did what?”

  “I showed initiative!” says Squalla, brightly.

  Darmble stares at her.

  “Get out of my sight,” he says.

  “—Sir?”

  Darmble rages. The building rattles as if under the weight of a storm.

  “Get. Out.”

  And Squalla flees.

  Darmble is alone.

  “I should reassign it,” he says.

  There are messages of dismay clamoring at the edges of his mind. Automated systems are distressed that a man too poor to file a report has been placed in charge of such a deeply red case.

  Problematic things, Darmble can see, are happening to the substance of the economy.

  “There is an assumption,” he says, “that debt will be paid. That is why we have the cut-off men.”

  A taxi business, relying for its investments on prompt payments from Elliott Darmblesson, goes red.

  A government bureau goes into default.

  In reaction to the appalling depths of his nonpayment, Elliott Darmblesson’s own interest rate spikes.

  He already owes—

  He owes—

  Ah . . .

  “Squalla,” says Darmble, quietly, and the sprite edges back into view. “What does it mean that my son owes so much money?”

  “It’s the natural tendency of the red line to repel the black,” says Squalla.

  “No,” Darmble says. “I don’t think it’s that.”

  “Well,” says Squalla, “maybe it means that you’d need millions of babies working in parallel to pay for just one Elliott Darmblesson.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Baby work,” says Squalla airily.

  “Ah,” says Darmble, through the machines, almost as if he understands.

  The machine looks towards the distant humanity that builds its parasites upon it.

  Again and again, it sees the beginnings of a pattern. Again and again, it begins to understand—but it is always too late.

  It is the nature of those parasites to bring the machinery of debt collection and of wealth to a shuddering, twisting death.

  “You should do something, boss,” Squalla says.

  “Did you ever think,” Darmble says, “that it was dangerous to put the entire debt collection system into the hands of someone who doesn’t want to be here?”

  Squalla squints at him.

  “Dangerous how?” she says.

  But Darmble just closes his eyes. He relaxes.

  “You should know,” he says, “that dogs are real. They have four legs and they bark.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” says Darmble. “When I was young, I heard them all the time.”

  And Squalla says, in distant confusion, “—I almost think that there is a larger, truer, deeper world, into which I only dip my toe in those moments of my greatest insights—”

  And Darmble channels more of the system’s resources towards her so that her thoughts may be rich and deep and filled with that fearsome uncertain beauty when the power in the building dies.

  It is difficult for a system—for any system—to look with any clarity backwards towards its creators or forwards toward its heirs.

  It is deep in the night when Elliott comes in again.

  He says, “Dad, that was petulant.”

  Darmble is still. He does not move.

  “If civilization dies,” Elliott says, “I’m just sayin’. It’ll be your fault. Not mine.”

  Darmble’s heart doesn’t beat, but it hasn’t beaten much in years.

  Darmble’s brain is used to waiting through the night in stillness for data. It is used to the slow process of rot.

  It does not notice its own death, and so Darmble does not die.

  Plugged into the machinery, waiting for the lights to come on, he dreams, and in his dreams gives answer to Elliott’s chiding.

  In the morning, it is still dark, and Darmble’s dreaming body smells.

  Rainbow Noir

  Long ago there was a girl who guarded the Rainbow World. Long ago there were magical bears that lived on clouds up in the sky.

  Long ago our world was beautiful and bright.

  It’s 1952, and the Rainbow World is dead. There’s only Shadow City now. It’s dark and it’s drab but there are glimmers of color here and there around the edges. The shine on the edge of the gang members’ leathers. The shimmer that runs down the length of their guns. The little rainbows you can see in a glass of gin when you hold it up to the light.

  Terrence is a sprite. He’s small and cute, covered in gray fur. In another kind of place, it might be a soft and fluffy white. He’s wearing a trenchcoat and a hat. He holds up his glass. He shakes it. Ice cubes clink one against the other. At the edge, the rainbows shine.

  “Hey.”

  It’s a girl’s voice. He ignores it. Girls are nothing but trouble. But she says it again. “Hey.” A blood-red hand comes to rest on his shoulder. “Terrence.”

  “One of my sins,” he asks, “come home to roost?”

  “In three hours,” she says, “everyone in Shadow City will die.”

  He sets his drink down on the bar and turns. He sees a flare of red and terrible light.