First World by Mark Jones

I started going to bed early and getting up at four each morning to sit in the chair and stare at my mug with my eyes closed. I knew I rebooted better if I was free to install my own updates using a densely drilled crude and the search engine in my head. This was done while wearing trousers, which were not donned before depositing a proper piss in the toilet and filling the sink with snot rockets. The unearthing of myself was a task that I just couldn’t outsource. It had to occur on my terms and come to pass uncontaminated with random refuse from the visual spectrum. After its completion, I would usually open the door, then be walked out into the twilight by my thrice upsized britches to find I was being overflown by a satellite and examined with undue worry by a cat. The planets would have shifted a bit on the ecliptic but it would of course take until sunrise for me to finally realize that fucking Mercury is probably on the other goddamn side of the Sun.

The racket of morning would usually be already upon me as soon as it got light out. This meant the squeal of unbalanced brake rotors. Combusted clouds of exhaust. The whine of high-pressure hydraulics throttling up with engine revs and the pop of plastic in the back of trash trucks. I needed to be inspired by something. I wanted to sink my teeth into more than the mold I was assured was a box of donuts. More than whatever the grocer said was not a rodent freshly asphyxiated in cellophane and sold to me as a sandwich. I was growing annoyed, and I felt an intense desire to burrow into the floorboards for a few months and just hibernate. I resisted this by running myself through some stretches, inventing a set of plyometrics, then heading out to find the library.

At the very least, I could put myself in a position to cross paths with a book that might season my jobless squalor with a narrative and put some charge back in my cytoplasm. Rather than concern, this was just me keeping a close eye on my vitals. Caffeine intake, beard growth, and a propensity to resort to cliché. I observed that while walking along the sidewalk, I might suddenly shift into an unrequited attempt to mentor myself with gibberish, like “You have to be proactive in the pursuit of the passive,” or “You have to wade into the stream a bit to catch something worth eating.”

I sniffed around for a while, but eventually had to ask a passerby to tell me where it was. The trudge over to the southeast corner of town was like a trip through the remains of post-explosion Chernobyl. None of the stoplights were on. All I saw were excavated sections of street, stray dogs, and driveways dead-ending in holes or in unrolled spindles of rusted fence. Piles of dirt, bags of mulch, and doorless port-o-potties sat abandoned in all cul-de-sacs. After a few minutes, I caught a glimpse of a white building and a few humans, so I started for it. It was a single-storey building with no windows other than the front door and a tiny observation station facing out onto the side where three empty car lanes snaked their way over speed bumps to tubes arcing down from the roof. What I was staring at had obviously been furnished to fulfill a role in the defunct ideal of the offline banking system. There were three truck trailers sitting on jacks behind the building, a makeshift rampway of switchbacks inclined to test the will of the handicapped, and a sign by the entrance that asked me to come in and discover my community through learning.

Upon walking across the doormat, I found its innards to be one partitionless grand cavern of such poorly planned acoustics the absorption of noise had apparently been subcontracted to whatever material lined my eardrum. The place was full of people, and I was just trying to think over the whip of all the floor fans and the direct current they were inducing in my nose hair. The entire left half of the room was a lake of tabletop computer stations crammed together with their wires on two rows of picnic tables. The web was working again, judging from the fact that every seat was taken and a line of the homeless extended from the signup sheet all the way to the front vestibule. No one had cell phones. Every screen I saw was YouTube, Facebook, or some animated labyrinth of battlefields over which filthy children were spitting in euphoria at all the frolickingly good fun you could have killing things with keystrokes. The floor was a collage of old carpets draped over each other in diagonal lines, and the laminated warnings on the walls told me to report to a librarian if I smelled asbestos.

This was interesting, because from the look of things there didn’t seem to be anyone on the payroll at all. Just a fat old man with a gray beard and a nametag that said “Hirth” seated in one half of the remaining space orating The Brothers Karamazov before a bundle of otherwise unoccupied retirees. There were chairs for about twenty, all of them filled, none of them awake. I chuckled out loud as I passed, not because it was nap time, but because of the way Hirth was gorging himself in the ambiguously British English of the Declaration of Independence or of a red Chris Hedges foaming at the mouth in Pasadena about the next Rome. I didn’t see how a translation of Dostoyevsky called for the baritone of Bing Crosby any more than one of Homer came alive under the bark of Al Sharpton. You can always tell by the way someone talks that they’ve never been unemployed and alone in another country. They seem to think rolling their r’s and bouncing between vernaculars means they speak a foreign language.

The rest of the space was apparently just a temporary storage area for unused furniture all shoved in one corner but commandeered in the interim as a dusty jungle gym for unattended toddlers. I walked around for a few minutes under the ricochet of Hirth’s creative reading class, the click of fifty computer mice, and the hateful eye of a heavily tattooed youth pretending like he wasn’t following my movements and watching my pockets. But I had nothing. Just empty drawers that suggested that my assets were all intangible and an expression on my face that asked if he really thought it was my choice to come up Caucasian. Crooking was just no longer a pastime of class. You had to dress like a shrunken elf of yourself now and emblazon your exterior in the scars of a war party and target whoever you blamed for why instead of rolling with Drake in a drop top you swab oversized bags in a blue shirt under Concourse A.

A few laps later, I found myself near the front door again by a bulletin board that was bending under the weight of advertisements and hundreds of hand-scribbled messages. Most of them bore a version of the same clergy of car guy that professed to have left his roots, gone west with the wagons, and devoted his life to converting every fee he sees into a rebate. Others asked if I wanted a sofa, two body lift kits for
$39.50, a career as an assistant, or a once in a lifetime chance to fly in an open cockpit biplane. I was unenticed, which I attributed to me just needing either work or a discrete frequency on which I could at least slow the onset of senility by placing my fellow man on mute. There was a note from a “Sudhir” on a piece of manila envelope that looked as if it’d been ordered as a wood block carving of the whole paragraph, wet with ink, and slammed onto the paper like a stamp. It said he was looking for someone with a good grip that could work under minimum supervision and that the remission of wages would occur with cash instrument by the square centimeter. I memorized the phone number.

It was noon. The class had adjourned. The retirees were dispersing, and Hirth was waddling over to a closet of cleaning supplies that contained a chair, one ironing board, and a flashlight swinging from the ceiling on a string. I caught him midstep and asked if he could direct me to the room in which they kept the books. Oh, they were out back inside the trailers, and did I not care to check my email or peruse the periodicals. I replied in the negative. He handed me three keys, smiled, said you’re a peculiar one, went over and sat down in his closet, then pulled out a tablet, lowered his bifocals, and started to read.

I left the bedlam through the unmarked exit at the rear of the building to which Hirth had gestured and found it so suddenly quiet out that the thud of it shutting actually made me sorry. I undid the latch on the first trailer but kept the bolt seated on one side while climbing up the bumper and bracing myself on a piece of frayed rubber seal coming off the other. The interior was lined on all sides by full shelves, but there were just as many other books thrown into disorder on the plywood. The first trailer turned out to be for novelists longwinded enough to induce vomiting but photogenic enough to pose as clairvoyants. I had no time for this. Hopped down, locked up, then went over and opened the latch on the second. Technical manuals and reference books. Encyclopedias, world maps, and cassette tapes created when the thing that we listened to was not the thing that we used to find our position. The third was empty, except for a rotting Roald Dahl and an open roll of microfiche.

Hirth appeared in the open end of the trailer to bang on the door with how was I doing and would I be interested in maybe making a little money. My job, should I so desire it, would be to unravel the bindings on the entire inventory, lay the pages flat, wrap them in twine, then set them out for recycling. It was more profitable to part with the lot for their paper than pay for the labor of properly documenting them as donations. I could come and go as I pleased. The keys would be tucked under a tire. This was agreeable. Hirth showed me where I could find the twine and the container by the street in which the paper was to be placed. I would begin the next day, but we discussed little else. I sensed a complete lack of common ground with him. He wore his slacks at a height that made it look as though his groin area was another abdomen, and he walked around with his hands in his pockets like he was clasping the edge of lapels.

I was hungry. It was time to stop in at the supermarket on the way back for a whole meatloaf, one red apple, and a pack of green bananas that I didn’t intend to eat. I just wanted to stare at them. To sit back silently as they ripen, yellow, and spoil. I just wanted to laugh at the world for its fragility and outlive it on some level and switch sides for a second to watch something besides me become compost.

At the register, I was being led through the checkout process by a miniature screen that said it detected a foreign object in the bagging area and told me either to check it or press cancel to exit. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply in an effort to aerate my insides with the fresh air necessary to clarify whether I was more overwhelmed with the array of choice there, or the baseless lack of tact in assuming I hadn’t already done that. I wanted to bludgeon it with something but judged from the discoloration of its liquid crystals this had been repetitively attempted, plus I was under the gaze of an armada of ceiling-mounted optics. The sole employee in front by the locked tobacco case was pretending he wasn’t aware of me and not hiding a CB radio with his thumb poised ready to transmit his distress to the pigs. His complexion said he was native enough to know the best way to get blow across the border, and he appeared to have subjected his mustache to the same battery of wind tunnel tests Whitcomb ran on the winglet.

I switched to a different checkout machine, paid, walked out the front door, then went right around the building and back in through the open loading dock. There was no one around. I found a phone on the wall by the control box used to raise and lower the cargo bay. A handwritten note next to it said dial nine to get out. If it was only that easy, I sighed to myself, hoping this Sudhir was the answer to all my problems and the golden aqueduct to the fertile farmland of a career. His son picked up, and informed me that he would be acting on behalf of the ‘primary’ despite being currently predisposed in tenth grade physics, that reception at school is spotty, and that if we got disconnected, we should text. I sensed a high degree of training. His voice was not his own, and followed the inflections of a force-fed second generation Kudrati and the cold anonymity of a human pruned to waste his valedictorianism on the local college of Pharmacy. He gave me an address and a time at which I was to meet his father for more details.

I started in on the novels the next morning and got through sixteen of them in two hours, but by ten it was far too hot in the trailer to breathe. Hirth paid me by the pound, and had placed a small mechanical scale and a roll of twine just inside the doors. I was to shoot for about the weight of a gallon, to only measure them after wrapping, and to never come to work during the first twenty-four hours after it rained. There were holes in the ceiling, and did I not think Hemingway was drenched in enough of himself as it is. And ha ha ha, and wasn’t he well read, and here’s one I might like from this guy Fuller about how to build a dome.

I locked the trailer and took off walking North to where I was to speak with Sudhir. My face was hot. I bought a root beer from a vending machine for an exorbitant sum of money and let it slosh around with the air in my belly. An hour passed. I was still half a mile away when I realized my destination was the last turn off before the street dead-ended in a fence on the far side of the interstate. The lane was an inlet to a parking lot and the final resting place of a megacenter for something so essential it required four separate entrances. The automatic doors of each had been boarded up, and the building frame was peeling off in strips. The pavement had come dislodged from itself and was swimming around in swaths like slabs of sea ice. At the far corner of the lot there was a small yellow construction vehicle sitting alone. It had a telescoping boom arm with one swivel, a single open seat surrounded by several levers, and it was precariously balanced on the tip of its scoop and the aft edge of its tracks. The area at that end of the lot bore the only sign of recent human activity, as its pavement had been jackhammered into bits and gathered in piles. I figured I was about three hours early. It was time to find a way into the building and snoop around.

This proved easy, because the unboarded manual door at each entrance was already either obliterated or completely removed from its hinges and thrown into the lobby. There was nothing inside except one plastic clothes hanger, some oddly lain carpet, a few confused frogs, one underinflated soccer ball, and the overwhelming stench of stagnant air. A hole in the roof at one end let in enough light to illuminate half the space, so I spent the next two hours juggling the ball by myself and scoring imaginary goals. My net was the returns service desk. I sent the ball flying uncaringly into it at progressively oblique offsets and increasing speeds that communicated belligerence and a focused intent to destroy. It was beyond gratifying. I didn’t have to hold my breath for anyone. I didn’t have to pretend to be tickled or tiptoe atop others’ perceptions or stumble unknowingly into someone’s unwritten rules. I was fucking trespassing, and it felt orgasmically good.

After a while, fatigue began to degrade my aim, so I went outside to search for a vending machine and let the sun dry my shirt, but upon emerging into the day I noticed an unfamiliar buzzing sound that hadn’t been there before. I was interested in the yellow construction machine, so I took off walking in its direction to see if it had keys. The buzzing followed. There were no animals afoot, none of the lot lights were on, and there wasn’t one human as far as the eye could see. I looked up and found I was being reconnoitered by a drone. It descended to eye level and held position slightly off to my left while I walked, a red light started blinking, then a voice came out with good afternoon, my name is Sudhir. Thank you for coming. Did I have any experience demolishing things and tolerating noise. The voice either stayed stubbornly in the interrogative or offered insincere ritualistic praise, but asked questions in a way that said it wasn’t interested in answers. Would I take the jackhammer off the rear of the backhoe, would I start the engine, and would I then confirm the air pressure on the gauge. Would I put on the pair of gloves under the seat and try a bit over here in this area. Well done. Would I do at least 30 hours per week. Would I look after my own lunch and rehydration requirements and would I wear ear plugs for insurance reasons. His tone was getting to me. It was the cutthroat kind of business gentility that abhors pork and the mistreatment of beef but would be happy to drag you into your own filth so he can float to the top of the food chain.

I only spoke with Sudhir after that on paydays, which I knew had arrived when the drone showed up and started flying a zigzag pattern and bombarding me with LIDAR. It would then retreat for about thirty minutes and reemerge for a landing nearby, pause its propellers, flash its red lamp, and instruct me to retrieve the envelope from the cargo compartment. I would be treated to a compliment that smelled of critique and then a truck would swing by and sit with the AC on while I lifted the piles of asphalt one crumbling slab at a time onto its bed.

The library books dried up after two months, but I stayed on jackhammering the parking lot into fragments for well over a year. I got so good at soccer I could spin the ball into whatever was left of the service desk from out in the lobby. I ordered obscene amounts of meat pizza, grew oblivious to my own scent, and replaced electrolytes by swallowing one small rock of imported Himalayan pink salt every other hour. It was satisfying to preside over both the tightening of my muscular suite and the addition of the shopping mall to the list of things we once visited but now just scroll through and click on. I felt a certain symmetry with this, like I’d uncovered an unknown kind of conservation of energy or been written in as beneficiary on a will of derivatives designed to route the last ramparts of physical commerce into my biceps.

I put down the jackhammer and picked up my seventeenth envelope on a hot July day at three in the afternoon because there was no more asphalt left. Sudhir said I was his best, but that a man of my age should be settled. I took that as a compliment, then started walking down the lane for the turn off and the appetizing sight of a dead eagle in the street being picked to bits by crows and carried away by ants.