The House Of Jeb

I LOOKED AT MY WATCH: eleven hundred hours, lunchtime. I supposedly had no longer than oh-one-three-oh to get over to my Joy Center. Yesterday, Brandsday, was officially the end of my work cycle, but unofficially, I needed extra green, so for the second time this quarter, I was pulling an eight-day stint on the floor. My Automatonian shares were doing well since I’d pumped in a few hundred chips into the account. They were flexi-hours accumulated from the last quarter. This was turning into a habit, and if I didn’t fuck up it, my windfall.

When the new calendar went into effect, the rest of the world plunged into angry turmoil. We A-packers were old hands by then, positively avant-garde.

It was early, and I wasn’t going to work straight away. I had wrangled some negative flexies so I could go down to the corner bar where there was live music and people out on the terrace drinking. Free folk, guys who got up and went to bed when it suited them. A taxi pulled up to the curb. I saw Georgië pay the cabbie and stick her two-toned cowboy boot out onto the asphalt. She peered from under her bangs and bangles to see who might have arrived. The gold lamé western bomber jacket I’d seen before, but today’s dizzying look included a hitched-up tube skirt. Never mind that it was pathetic. I mean, who did she think she was going to run into at a biker bar on a Sunday afternoon, Jesus, and yes, God—how cringy—it was a rockabelly cover band. I smiled and waved at her anyway; even from where I stood, I could tell she was sozzled. Most people at the Split Lip were in lazy, hair-of-the-dog mode, not Georgië. She was still for real burning down brain cells.

[If you're coming over from Substack, you're here:]

“What up, Calamity? You're blinding me with that outfit, girl.”

“Hey you!” I got air kisses that tickled my ears.

“Looking for Max. You seen him?”

She never got tired of talking about the crush, a mutual acquaintance. I didn't know what she saw in that wastrel. I guess he fit in with Georgië's natural chaos. It was these moments when she seemed daffiest and most innocent, which was endearing, but also weird, considering her rap sheet. She was one part girlie to three parts battery acid.

The annoying drop-down box on my phone announced an incoming call. It was fucking Jack Bishop, my L4. What did he want? It rang some, and I wanted to let it go to missed call, but then I thought something extreme could be happening that involved me.

“Jack.”

“Syreena, I need you to come in early. Someone collapsed on the floor.”

“Do tell. Who?”

“Jackson Brown, poor old dude. He stroked out.”

“Oh my god, is he going to be okay?”

“They took him to the emergency wing of the infirmary. I don’t have any information but he’s in capable hands.”

“He’s incapable of what? Sorry, Jack, there's a lot of noise here, live music.”

“Okay, just come in, please. There’s ten flexi-chips for you if you can get here before one-two-three-zero hours.”

So much for the second-rate fun I had been so looking forward to.

“On my way.”

I clocked in at twelve-twenty, threw my stuff in the locker and put on a fresh Automaton tee, the one with the logo of a smiling, bent-penis-shaped arrow, and went looking for Jack.

If I worked till twenty-six-thirty, I could probably ask for an extra day off, making it Saturday, Brandsday, and Sunday. I found Jack filling out the incident report. He saw me coming.

“Jackson’s dead.”

“Oh, no.”

I speculated inwardly about how this shift in logistics would affect my station.

“I've requested an emergency reassignment, don’t worry. You are not going to feel a thing.”

Bishop was no mindreader. We were all just so fucking predictable.

I didn’t think it was right to keep on hirees older than seventy. Pinned all day to my station, I’d never really spoken to Mr. Brown. What are we if we don’t make rate? Every second on the clock is monitored, every warm body accounted for, inspected and evaluated, given a score. Why didn’t anyone notice him? They never let us slide, so why can they? I imagined his body being packaged for disposal. He’d need a clamshell packaging unit, man-sized, to be delivered somewhere, in fetal position, or taken to the fulfillment site, the Automatonian potter’s field.

The afternoon sped by, as waves of merchandise broke against the harried packers, receding and breaking again, inundating some and only splashing others. The L4 managers, like head-tossing gulls, squawked at their charges while scavenging for bonus opportunities. Competition was fierce. They all wanted their Atta badges and extra flexies, while all we got were plastic ‘Unit p/h Master’ pins, and not as much as a paracetamol for our painstaking efforts.

Our leader, Jeb Besos, controlled all means of production and sale of all the merchandise everywhere in the world through his behemoth corporation, Automaton. He had once forced the British to dismantle London Bridge so that he could squeeze one of his triple-wide freight ships across the Thames, and he routinely dictated government policies worldwide, but now he was proudly manipulating time. His workers lived and worked by a separate calendar and schedule, which was a result of having established the Flexibanks, where Automatonian positive and negative flexi-hours could be bought, sold or saved by employees, and were eventually traded on the stock market as futures. It led to the definitive change in the world’s calendar. I remember my first gander at Automatonian time.

“There are eight days in an Automatonian week, and each day comprises not twenty-four hours but twenty-seven. An Automatonian year equals twelve months and a day, each month being thirty-two or thirty-three days long, and each week being eight days long. With the accrued time, a new seventh day was designated, between Saturday and Sunday. It’s called Brandsday, after Jeb’s son, Brand, whose name pays homage to his father’s foresight and acquisitive genius.”

I read this on the back of a bag of Automatonian potato chips. They came free if you took them in lieu of a proper meal and thirty minute break. Most people took ‘Chip Lunch’, called ‘Crisps Lunch’ in Europe, offered with unlimited, complimentary coffee, so they could leave thirty minutes earlier. Deadly combination. Even I, the smoker, found those chips saltier than a sea hag. It’s what had done in Jackson Brown.

My fifteen minute break over, I went back to bagging and boxing things I will never own, nor would ever want to own. But as the day wore on, I began to feel light-headed. I dialed up my arm brace to eight for the muscle aches. My movements were so rote, I could not remember if I had carried out certain operations a moment before, or just dreamed that I had. Warning buzzers went off, with messages on the overhead monitor. Now, in a Dickensian workhouse, the message would say GOD IS LOVE painted on the grimy wall above the workers’ heads, but here it was: INADEQUATE SERVICE LEVEL, with ninety dollars flashing in red at the bottom right hand corner of the screen. That was what would get docked if I didn’t pick up the pace.

That night I checked my stocks and saw my retracement levels rocking the fat green line. I took a deep breath, put up all my flexi-chips in one huge gamble and watched the thing take off. Six months later, I was not sipping Kirsch by a pool in Monte Carlo. I was still eating Chip Lunch, but now had almost no flexi-hours in the bank and therefore nothing to invest with. It was going to be a tough year. Georgië never stopped ridiculing my de facto loyalty to the company.

“Just get the hell out of there!” she said one night while I was pissing in the fetid restroom at The Blaggard’s Pier.

“To do what?”

I yelled across the stalls, shuddering to think of other kinds of jobs I could possibly do.

“I don’t know! You’re the one with Linked-In.” Her sniggering irritated me.

“Georgië, not everyone wants to live in a bohemian cloud of scams and dicey part-time gigs.”

“My money is real enough.”

She was retouching her lipstick and straightening her bobo hair ties. Dead serious all of a sudden, she glowered at me in the mirror over the sinks.

“And since you’re being such a bitch, let me remind you, Miss Ten-Forty, that I’m more solvent than you are. Who lent you the swag to get back into your day-job crap shoot? I withdrew that and enough left over to party all night, and I only work three hours a day. The rest of the time, I do what I want. Can you say the same?”

Georgië was playing the game with a different deck of cards. I knew I should not feel angry or jealous that she was serene and independent, and that she never, never lost her cool. Without even the benefit of a college degree, she tackled her problems as well as anyone I knew, and she managed to do it without hurting anyone or getting in over her head. She looked like a dingbat, but this was just her ridiculous taste in clothes. By contrast, with me, what you saw was what you got: haggard, scrawny, and defeated, the fruits of getting ground to a fine dust.

“No, I can’t say the same. I’m the one living in the dream world where I think I can take on the giant and walk away.”

“So wake up. You know what your problem is? It’s all this striving to be excellent, and fast, and like, noteworthy, always trying to improve, always taking notes with three different color pens…You know, you’re so uncool. You have no flow whatsoever.”

“I don’t even know what that is. Teach me, O Zen Master.”

“Sure. But you have to quit the House of Jeb first.”

“Yeah, that's not happening.”

“Why don’t you go back to cooking?”

“Because six years of sobriety.”

“What about the half a dozen other things you do? Your writing is so awesome! Your clothing designs, your music! When was the last time you wrote a song?”

“I don’t know.”

“You gave up on your dreams!”

“You’re one to talk. You were going to take down Taylor Swift.”

“That’s not me anymore.”

She said this as if the Georgië in front of me was the best version yet. I loved her for that, too.

“Well, suit yourself.” She scowled, then brightened. “It’s only twenty-five o’clock. I’m going dancing. You coming?”

The dubiousness of it all. Maybe she was right. It was not a through street where I’d parked my life.

“You can stay over and in the morning, call in sick or just quit.”

"But..."

"No buts. Call it."