87
ATLAS SLUGGED AGAIN
A Parody
by
Ellis Weiner
Cover by Adam Abramowicz
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Ellis Weiner
ISBN: 978-1-4581-9134-2
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Maria Bustillos and Bill Bennett for prompt reads and useful notes.
Thanks to Adam Abramowicz for meeting and exceeding his usual high standard
for speed, accuracy, and invention.
Chapter 1: Editor’s Introduction
1. The Work
A subject of speculation and rumor for decades, Atlas Slugged AGAIN (ASA) is the so-called “secret sequel” to the monumental Atlas Slugged (AS), by Annyn (rhymes with “hannyn”) Rant.
ASA has acquired an almost Grail-like status among the devotees of Rant’s work, the phrase “Where is Atlas Slugged AGAIN?” having become metonymic shorthand for an expression of futility or eternally-deferred salvation. The following exchange, recently encountered on a Rantian web site, is typical:
HRORK22: When will society ever be free of the parasides that steal our Freedom and pallute everything for us producers?
DOMINIQUEFRANK1: LOL. Where is Atlas Slugged AGAIN?
It is to such readers that news of the publication of this work will be particularly welcome. But why “secret sequel”? For two reasons: “Sequel,” because AS re-visits the characters and situations first explored in Atlas Slugged, published in 1957 by Fandom House. But “secret,” not only because Fandom declined to publish Atlas Slugged AGAIN, but because word of its very existence has been suppressed and denied from the moment its editor first perused the manuscript—a decision supported (albeit reluctantly) by the book’s author.
How the manuscript—the only one extant, as far as I know—came into my possession is worth a brief recounting.
In fact, it was delivered to my door by the mailman, in an ordinary manila envelope addressed to me. Inside I found what appeared to be an indisputably authentic document: a sheaf of pages, not printed with a computer’s uniformity and precision, but hand-typed on a manual typewriter, bound by two crossed rubber-bands, the title page of which bore the publisher’s official stamp noting the date of receipt (November 24, 1968). Attached by paper clip was a computer-printed letter reading:
Mr. Ellis Weiner:
I saw your review of Atlas Slugged on Amazon and decided that you should be the one to take custody of this, which has been in my possession since 1968. At the time, I worked as an editorial assistant to Annyn Rant’s editor at Fandom House. My boss had been the original editor of Atlas Slugged. When a messenger delivered this sequel, my boss (who had not been expecting any such thing) said, “Hot dog!,” told me to hold all calls, and shut himself in his office.
When he emerged two hours later, his face was white as a sheet. He handed me the manuscript and said, “Burn this. And let us speak no more of it.” I laughed and said something like, “Well, I don’t know about ‘burn.’ But I’ll dispose of it.” I took the ms. but curiosity got the best of me. I hid it in a drawer until I could smuggle it home that evening.
The days that followed were full of crisis. My boss contacted both Ms. Rant and her agent and told them that publishing ASA would be “career suicide—for all of us.” His principal objection—supported by Fandom House’s legal counsel—was that one character in particular was so clearly modeled on an actual, living person, that that individual would have “a damn good” case to bring suit against the publisher, the author, “and any poor bastards in the immediate vicinity.” The upshot of such a suit would, he felt certain, not only result in substantial monetary damages, but in a complete recall and pulping of all extant copies of the book. Not only would Fandom House suffer, but so would Rant’s reputation, and probably Rant’s personal life as well.
Ms. Rant—who as you know was a highly intelligent and determined woman—at first insisted the work be published. But after several days, she, too, began to think the better of it. In the end, she agreed with my boss, and sent a formal letter withdrawing the ms.
When I read it at home I was saddened to think about its suppression, as it seemed to me to be a perfect sequel to Atlas Slugged. As for the “new” character, I was not at the time as familiar as I came to be, with the man on whom he was (so clearly) based. At the time I simply took it on faith that my boss and our lawyers knew what they were talking about. And so I held onto the manuscript but never mentioned it to anyone. In fact, I actually forgot about its existence until recently when, packing for a move to a retirement in Arizona, I came across it again.
I do not know if Ms. Rant kept her carbon, and if so, who has it now. So this may be the only copy left.
I leave it to you—a proven fan of her work—to decide whether to destroy it, turn it over to her estate, or arrange for its publication yourself. I apologize if this places an unfair burden on you, but as I said, your review of Atlas Slugged on Amazon was so positive and insightful, I decided this poor orphaned work could have no better guardian. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
So touching was this letter, and so intriguing an opportunity did it present, that I couldn’t find it in my heart to inform the writer of it that in fact I had never reviewed Atlas Slugged on Amazon. But a brief glance at that web site confirmed that “Ellis Weiner” had given the book five stars, and had reviewed it thus:
THIS BOOK IS GREAT!! IT IS MY FAVORITE BOOK. THE PHILSOSOPHY (sic) IN THIS BOOK WAS VERY INTERESTING. IT SHOWS THAT BECAUSE THE UNIVERSE EXISTS YOU SHOULD USE YOUR MIND AND BE INTELLIGENT AND NOT LISTEN TO STUPID PEOPLE! NO ONE SHOULD DO ANYTHING FOR ANYONE ELSE UNLESS THEY GET SOMETHING IN RETURN BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES SENSE.
After several hours of Googling and other detective work I discovered that the Ellis Weiner who had written this review was a ten-year old boy from Sherman Oaks, California. (It was merely one more strange facet of this tale, that there should be anywhere on earth another person named “Ellis Weiner.”) As I had, for decades, been published as an author and co-author of various books, as well as a writer for many magazines and a national blog, I could hardly blame the person who had sent me Atlas Slugged AGAIN for assuming that its Amazon review had been written by me, and not a fourth grader fond of his Caps Lock key.
So I decided to return the manuscript (after reading it) to the person who had sent it. But I discovered that the envelope had no return address, and the signature at the end of the letter was indecipherable. I made a token effort to research who, in 1968, had been Annyn Rant’s editor, and who had been his assistant, but both inquiries yielded nothing.
I could, of course, have delivered the manuscript to the Annyn Rant Society, or to a university, or to Fandom House. But, frankly, I didn’t want to. I was one of the few people I knew who had actually read the entirety of Atlas Slugged, and I found the possibility of being associated with its legendary sequel to be too tantalizing to relinquish.
So I arranged to have Atlas Slugged AGAIN published. The present text is a complete rendition of the manuscript as I received it. Apart from the routine correction of typos, nothing has been edited, excised, or added.
Before proceeding, however, it might be helpful to place the characters and events covered in ASA in context.
2. The precursor: Atlas Slugged
Atlas Slugged was Annyn Rant’s second major novel. (Her first, The Figurehead, dealt with the theme of personal genius, set in the cut-throat world of tall ship design.) At the center of AS are five principal protagonists:
Dragnie Tagbord – Beautiful, brilliant, stylish, bold, fit, flirty, ‘n’ fabulous. She inherited Tagbord Rail from her grandfather, Old Man Pop Gramps “Professor” Zayde Poppa Tagbord, who built the transcontinental railroad empire single-handedly, with his bare hands, in the snow.
John Glatt – Handsome, brilliant, enigmatic, a genius engineer who becomes disgusted with society and goes into hiding, thus acquiring the stature of a messianic leader.
Hunk Rawbone – Handsome, brilliant, founder and sole owner and operator of Rawbone Metal. Rawbone invents Rawbonium, a miracle metal that “will save the entire U.S. economy.” Turn-ons: watching “heats” and “pours” of steel. Turn-offs: mean people, nice people, poor people, rich people, and his wife.
Sanfrancisco Nabisco Alcoa D’Lightful D’Lovely Desoto – Handsome, brilliant, a childhood chum of Dragnie while the two were growing up in different hemispheres. Heir to the Desoto Talc Mines in Chile, “World Capital of The Powder of Babies.” Spends all his time pursuing empty hedonism as a feckless playboy, which is the worst kind.
Regnad Daghammarskjold – Handsome, beautiful, attractive, brilliant, drop-dead gorgeous, tall and tan and young and lovely, a (naturally) blond Swedish pirate.
The plot of Atlas Slugged is lengthy and convoluted, but can be summarized thus: The U.S.—which is not exactly the U.S., as its government seems to have no Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branches—is run by “Mr. Thomas,” who has no first name. He is surrounded by a coterie of spineless bureaucrats, self-seeking careerists, hypocritical moralists, and contemptible weaklings. These men share a secret knowledge: that, all over the country, persons of achievement (businessmen, entrepreneurs, tycoons, moguls, big shots, etc.) are “disappearing.” One day they simply stop coming to work and utterly vanish, sending the national economy into a tailspin.
Meanwhile, every other country in the world (except, by the end, Goa) has succumbed to the urge to collectivize, and declared itself a “People’s State of the People.”
Throughout it all, Dragnie and Hunk Rawbone struggle to run their businesses, Desoto displays a seemingly callous indifference to the talc industry, Daghammarskjold rampages all over the bounding main…and everyone wonders aloud, “Who is John Glatt?”
Eventually it is revealed that Glatt has been constructing, in a secret valley in Wyoming, a hideaway for tycoons. Dubbed “Glatt’s Gorge,” it is there that the “disappearing” moguls have gone—a Meritocratic Retirement Community ™ where rich men pursue their hobbies, artists-in-residence live for free and explore their vision, and the cares and vexations of the outside world (society, history, politics, poverty, children, race, disease, natural calamity, competition for resources, crime, corruption, pollution, hunger, terrorism, religious conflict, etc.) are forbidden by law.
Glatt’s Gorge is a combination Shangri-La, Brigadoon, and Camelot, and all--from the gold coins the community mints as its private currency to the custom-made cigarettes stamped with the Glatt’s Gorge symbol of the dollar sign and the exclamation mark--sustained in its concealment from the rest of the world by a sort of “lens” that projects a disguising image over its valley, to hide it from prying eyes. (Like another 1950’s novelist-philosopher, L. Ron Hubbard, Annyn Rant was unafraid to make use of the crowd-pleasing genre conventions of science fiction.)
Glatt’s scheme is to demonstrate to society what happens when its productive members, who philosophically object to labor unions and collective bargaining, decided to “go on strike,” to withhold their abilities and talents until the “leeches,” “moochers,” and “parasites” that comprise most of American society (and essentially all of humanity) show sufficient appreciation for the strikers. As the climax nears, the national economy deteriorates; Mr. Thomas and the fawning courtiers around him become increasingly desperate; and drastic measures are employed to persuade John Glatt to rescue the nation and demonstrate, to all mankind, the benefits of having a reclusive engineer control an entire nation’s economy.
It is a vast, winner-take-all epic set against an immense, brawling tapestry about a wild, untamed continent as passionate and sweeping as turbulent America herself. But it is more than that. It is also a love story, one in which both Hunk Rawbone and John Glatt love, and therefore desire, and therefore despise, Dragnie. She, in turn, loves and despises them.
The entire saga reaches its thrilling climax in a speech given by John Glatt. Commandeering a radio broadcast, Glatt (who has cannily concealed his true intent by behaving for most of the book like a monosyllabic, sulky child) expounds on his theory of existence, life, human nature, morality, creation, productivity, art, economics, virtue, ethics and the self. A masterpiece of high indignation and elevated rhetoric, Glatt’s oration is a forthright attack on those who preach that “Man has no mind.” He openly mocks those who would assert that “the Mind is impotent.” He explicitly refutes those who believe that “the individual self is worthless.”
The address is famous—or notorious—for its length. It has been estimated that, if read verbatim on an actual radio broadcast, Glatt’s Speech would take three hours to deliver and, since almost all people who listen to radio do so while driving, would so thrill, inspire, terrify, bore, outrage, or baffle listeners as to result in two hundred and forty-five traffic accidents and at least thirty-seven fatalities during a non-rush-hour time period.
The novel ends in a thriller-like flurry of imprisonment, torture, rescue, escape, and triumph. That it was, from its original publication in 1957 up until today, a best seller, should surprise no one. Half again as long as Ulysses and second in influence only to the Bible, Atlas Slugged is a titanic, sprawling epic set in a politically-imaginary America surrounded by a world that never existed, replete with science fiction devices and impossible technology, and all in the service of a 643,000-word treatise on “reality.” Small wonder tens of thousands of readers have, for more than fifty years, clamored for a sequel.
And yet it was not to be. Once written, Atlas Slugged AGAIN was blocked from publication, not only by its publisher, but by its author. As alluded to by my mysterious correspondent, the sequel’s character of “Nathan A. Banden” was thought by many (including Fandom House’s legal counsel) to be too clearly and obviously modeled on a real-life figure--a man with whom Annyn Rant engaged in an extramarital affair in the early 1960s, begun when she was age 50 and he (her protégé, acolyte, and business partner) was 25.
Conducted with the knowledge and consent of their respective spouses, the relationship ended four years later amid accusations of betrayal and disloyalty, and scenes of shouting, slapping, and banishment. Rant, who had dedicated AS both to her husband and to her young lover, removed the latter’s name from subsequent editions and repudiated much of his work with her.
Thus, rescued from oblivion, Atlas Slugged AGAIN arrives with a dual identity: as a perhaps too-rash reply to a faithless lover from a woman scorned, and as the inspiring sequel to one of the most inspirational, if controversial, novels of all time.
Ellis Weiner
PART I
THAT THAT IS, IS;
THAT THAT IS NOT, IS NOT;
THAT THAT IS IS NOT THAT THAT IS NOT.
IS NOT THAT IT?
IT IS.
Chapter 2: Where Eagles Dare to Gather
“Who is John Glatt?”
Dragnie Tagbord chuckled as the arms of the students before her shot with arrow-like directness and clean mechanical precision toward the ceiling. Among this group of third-graders, such a response--the lifting of hands and their display to the gaze of their instructor, each other, and to the distinguished woman visiting their school--was a proud and public announcement of knowledge. I know, proclaimed each raised hand. I know, with pure awareness in the consciousness of my mind, the answer to the question I have just been asked.
Their teacher, Miss Pigg, was a short, squat woman in a shapeless, baggy garment the color of desiccated oatmeal. Although constantly informed by politicians and television personalities of her value to society, in her outward, personal appearance she looked shabby and morose, as if harboring in some unconscious recess of her intelligence the shameful awareness of the fact that, like all those whose livelihoods involved servicing the needs of children, she produced nothing. She pointed. “Yes, Johnny Timmons? Do you know?”
“I?” The boy, a ten-year-old unafraid to proclaim his love of truth, suppressed a smile tinged with amused mockery. “Yes, I know it. John Glatt is the smartest, bravest, most rational man in society,” he replied. “It was he who, ten years ago, recruited our nation’s true producers—the entrepreneurs and businessmen whose vision, courage, and energy wrests value from the mute, raw earth—and led them into a strategic retreat from the forces of theft, cowardice, and corruption that prevailed over men in that desperate time. It is to him..um…”
Dragnie whispered, “It is to him we owe—”
“It is to him we owe the Age of Production, which we enjoy—”
The rest of the class joined in. “—TO THIS VERY DAY!”
A laugh escaped from Dragnie’s lips. Exercising her free will, she re-captured it and restricted it to solitary confinement. She had chosen to spend this John Glatt Day touring one of the ten thousand kindergarten-through-Grade Twelve institutions, all of them independently owned and operated and all of them called The Glatt School, that had replaced the hidebound and notoriously inefficient public educational system. It would not do, she thought, to display levity in this, or any, environment.
Wordlessly, Dragnie turned and left the classroom. There was no need to thank the pupils. There was no need to thank their teacher. There was no need to wish them well. Her exit was itself a kind of lesson. Do not ask for praise, it said. Do not ask for acknowledgment or good wishes or pampering. Do not ask for “please” or “thank you” or “you’re welcome” or “Gezundheit” or any of the other tokens of mental enslavement with which men have for centuries sought to limit the sacred freedom of the individual ten-year-old and draft him like a chump into the unconscious mob that men call “society.” We have no time for nurturing. Our enemies are massing. We need you to be strong—not only when you become adults, but today. We need strong third-graders, and second-graders, and first-graders. We need strong kindergarteners and nursery-schoolers and pre-schoolers and Mom-and-Me toddlers and babies and infants. We desperately need strong neonates, fetuses, and zygotes. For that matter, we need strong housepets. We need strong dogs and cats. We need strong hamsters. We need strong gerbils.
Dragnie’s heels clicked with rhythmic percussiveness and her smart gray suit fell perfectly and shifted gently as she strode down the corridor. Two tiers of lockers lined the walls of the hallway, each locker with its own reinforced padlock built to withstand a blast equivalent to twenty pounds of TNT, to ensure the sacred privacy and protection every peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, every Yum-Time juice box, every Super-Fun-Pak of Fat-Free Mockolate Chip cookies, from looters of the world.
A distinctive sound caught Dragnie’s ear as she neared the main entrance lobby. It was the sound of a human voice, emanating from the school’s auditorium. She felt herself drawn involuntarily toward it, as if something in her unconscious were responding to something of which she was not conscious. Her slim legs and trim suit cast a gliding shadow across the lobby’s travertine floor in the slanting afternoon sun. Opening the heavy, ornate oak door of the auditorium, she entered.
The theater was dark, its house lights turned off and therefore providing no illumination by which things might be seen. Chilly white fluorescent lights beamed down from over the stage, however, and by their efficient glow Dragnie could perceive, with her sense of vision, the presence of two persons. One was seated in the front row. She was an adult, obviously a teacher or administrator, whose slouching posture and indifferent air revealed her as someone for whom existence was a thing to be taken for granted. “Not so fast, Nathan,” the woman called, smugly pleased with her authority and the sanction it provided for dispensing criticism of the work of others. “Start over.”
The target of her command was the young man onstage. He was an older student, probably a senior. Standing erect at a lectern, he wore the trademark dark slacks and sage-green shirt and tricolor necktie embossed with dollar signs of the Upper School boys. He received the woman’s advice with an unruffled ease, as if already accustomed to being subjected to the glib, careless directions of the second-guessers and public-speaking-correctors and high-school-student-bossers-around of the world.
“Parents, teachers, Principal Sloughninny, fellow students,” he proclaimed. “We have come tonight to celebrate John Glatt, and I? Who am I, you ask? I am the senior who has been selected to represent the student body. I am the senior who has written this speech which I myself am giving to you now. I am the senior who is alive as himself and is the me that you see before you at this very moment.”
Dragnie found herself stumbling into a seat as though in a daze as if in a hypnotic trance. Her eyes never left his tall, erect, noble, commanding, confident figure even as her ears never left his astute, devastating words.
“You have said, ‘How can an eighteen-year-old give a speech that will do justice to John Glatt?’ I am doing so for you now. You have said, ‘No school child is competent to offer adequate praise to the smartest, bravest, most rational man in society.’ I am proving you wrong as I speak. You have said, ‘The mind of a high school student is impotent and without value.’ I am refuting that assertion in ways you have hitherto found unimaginable.”
His voice was rich and well-modulated. His articulation was exact and flawless. Dragnie’s conscious mind possessed the fullest awareness of the fact that he had composed this speech for an audience of students, teachers, and parents, to be presented that evening at the school’s John Glatt Day celebration. Nonetheless she felt, with a sudden shudder and a flush of pleasure, that he had written it expressly for, and was now delivering it solely to, her, to be detected and processed by the auditory system functioning flawlessly within the living mind of her personal and inviolate head.
“Yes, we will praise John Glatt tonight. But I will do more than that. I will honor John Glatt by asserting my values. I will honor John Glatt, not by kowtowing to the bumming-out expectations you would lay on me, not by kneeling on bended knee to the bad trip of pious slogans that the so-called ‘adults’ deem okay for a ceremony of this kind. I will honor John Glatt by asking questions you would rather not be asked, which you fear being asked—but which must be asked, if in this school, and in every school, men are to be truly free.”
“Wait a minute, Nathan—” the teacher began.
“Let him finish!” Dragnie cried.
The teacher turned with a start and peered back toward the rear of the auditorium, seeking to determine the source of the outburst. “Miss Tagbord?”
“Yes,” Dragnie replied with icy veracity.
“Sorry. Continue, Nathan.”
The boy peered deeply into the gloom of the unlit seats. He seemed then to catch Dragnie’s eye and, with a small mocking smile of amusement and contempt, returned to his text. “It is I, then, who will now ask you, Principal Sloughninny, and you, Vice-Principal Flabb, the question which all seniors now ask—or should be asking, if their faculties of reason have not been so damaged by the nowhere nature of this institution and their self-respect not sundered by what’s going down in this school’s freaked-out scene. The question is this: Why must the Senior Prom, the theme for which this year is ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ be held in the gymnasium of this school, and why can it not be held, as everyone wants it to be, in the La Superba Room of Chez Elegance Caterers? The cost of renting the facility can be recouped by the sale of tickets, at a suggested rate of five dollars stag, eight dollars drag. True, admission to the Prom in the gym is free. But no student utilizing his mind, no student exercising his reason, will balk at the patent justness of this nominal fee in exchange for a much cooler set-up.
“Furthermore, regarding the matter of chaperones, we who tremble on the brink of adulthood, we who’ll by term’s end be eligible to serve in the nation’s armed forces, we who for two years now have possessed the legal right to drive a motorized vehicle and have had experience doing so—we insist: we will have no chaperones. We reject their authority. We ask: By what right do they presume to monitor and inhibit our celebration of existence, our rejoicing in the impending milestone of graduation, our frankly erotic fooling around?”
The speech lasted an hour and twenty minutes, during which the young man, calmly and with exquisitely controlled passion, announced his defiance of hall monitors, presented unanswerably his critique of “the legislative sham that is our so-called ‘Student Council,’” and delivered a ringing challenge to the policy of requiring cheerleaders to wear tights both at practices and at interscholastic athletic competitions. By the time he ended with the traditional tracing, toward the audience, of the dollar sign and the exclamation mark, Dragnie had slowly risen to her feet and, her chin held high in open admiration, begun a quiet but pointed round of applause.
The young man descended the three steps from the stage to the auditorium floor and joined her in the aisle. He was taller than she, gaunt and lean and erect in a body that hinted at hidden reserves of productive energy and rationally-managed ardor. His face belied his youth, and seemed to harbor a wisdom and experience beyond his years. His gaze at her was direct and uncowed. “I’m glad you approve, Miss Tagbord.”
They were interrupted by the appearance of another young man. He was dressed in an identical manner to that of the young man who had given the speech, as if the two of them, though distinct individuals, attended the same school--which, as a matter of objective fact, was in fact the fact. “Nice speech, Nathan,” said the other young man.
“Thank you, Eddie,” said the speech maker. “Oh, Miss Tagbord? Allow me to introduce Eddie G. Willikers. He’s on the stage crew here.”
“Gosh,” Eddie Willikers said. “Are you Dragnie Tagbord?”
“I am,” Dragnie replied.
“Not so fast, Eddie!” Nathan said with a hint of mockery. “I saw her first!”
“Yes, you did,” Eddie replied. “Well, nice to have met you, Miss Tagbord. See you later around the school, Nathan.” He walked away in a manner consistent with his own personal choice.
“Your name is Nathan, young man?” she asked.
“Yes, it is,” he replied. “Nathan A. Banden. Will you be attending the commemoration tonight, Miss Tagbord?”
“No,” Dragnie said, electing not to insult his intelligence with an apology, a condescending smile, or any other expression of regret. “I have other plans.”
“That is regrettable.”
“To you, perhaps.”
“Yes…to me. Isn’t that the only one who matters?”
“To you, perhaps.”
“Yes, to me. But don’t I matter to you, too, Miss Tagbord? If only a little?”
“No.”
“Quite right. And yet…”
“Good-bye, Nathan. My compliments on an excellent speech.”
The boy hesitated. Then he said, “Thank you, Miss Tagbord.”
Almost against her will, Dragnie found herself saying, “You’re welcome.”
Looking at each other, they exchanged glances on an equal, voluntary basis. “Am I?” he asked.
“Yes, you’re,” she said. “You’re welcome.” And as she made her way up the slanted floor toward the lobby, she knew, as deeply and as confidently as she had known anything in her life, that it was true.
Chapter 3: Be a Do-er, Not a Viewer
The apartment occupied the penthouse of the Johnsonwood Building, the most indomitably proud and heroic skyscraper in New York, considered in the consensus of top experts to be the greatest building in the world and, therefore, in the universe. From its four immense windows Dragnie and her husband could, and with unfailing regularity, did, look out in all directions at once, in steely indifference and unchallengeable certainty.
Her husband was John Glatt.
That they were not legally married, had never been engaged, had never formally been lavoliered, or ever gone steady, was of no importance. He was her husband because no one else was or possibly could be. And Glatt’s understanding was identical to hers. Openly he professed in the privacy of his mind that she, to him, was his wife no less than he, to her, was her husband, and equally so was he her husband to him, just as she was wife to him to him no less than to her. Consumed with hatred for her by his love for her, he never spoke of it, nor of anything else.
Yet Glatt demonstrated every day his approval of Dragnie: with every cold glance with which he acknowledged her existence each morning, every slit-eyed smirk with which disdained her over cocktails in the evening, every hand-written card he proffered on the anniversary of their first meeting (“I despise you more than ever, dearest.”), and even that one time, when they had engaged in sexual intercourse, when he demonstrated his admiration and respect by brutally degrading her into a humiliated submission as he sneered his contempt and she laughed out loud in silent mockery.
They were husband and wife because they considered themselves to be so in their minds.
They now sat across from one another at the beautiful mahogany table in their elegantly-appointed dining room as the sun slowly set, as it had done for billions of years all over the universe. Pierre, their footman, had just served the night’s meal, a repast of gourmet food possessing the highest deliciousness, impeccably complimented by an excellent wine that John Glatt had decanted, opened, chosen, unpacked, shipped, aged, bottled, fermented, stomped, picked, and planted himself with cool, swift precision.
Glatt’s eyes skimmed the evening newspaper, affording him the opportunity to see the words printed on it and transferring the information they conveyed to his mind. Then his lean, sardonic face lifted from the page. He surveyed the platters of steaming, perfectly-prepared meat, healthful garden vegetables, and taste-tempting side dishes arrayed before him. In a single silent act he shifted his gaze from them to Dragnie until their eyeballs silently beheld one another’s. “You who claim to serve no one,” he said. “You for whom the very idea of granting a favor is a metaphysical chimera, an imaginary creature possessing no reality; you whose sole allegiance is, not to some comforting but fictional construct called ‘society’ but, simply and utterly, to existence; you for whom life itself is rational and self-interested or it is nothing; you who, without shame or boasting, call ‘self-reliance’ what the mass of men call ‘selfishness;’ you who ask nothing of any man for which you will not, at once and without cavil, give some other thing of equal value; you, who know in the deepest recesses of your consciousness that to perform the slightest kindness to others, without the promise of reciprocity in a manner that is meaningful to you on your own terms, is to collude in the enslavement of both them and yourself; you, who ask nothing of the world apart from its consent to leave you to freely pursue your desires in a manner consistent with your own values and morality—will you, not so much in violation of these principles as from an unthreatened position of strength afforded by them, pass the brisket?”
“Yes, John, I will,” Dragnie said. “But I will do so, not out of some received and, thus, limiting sense of obligation as imposed upon me by centuries of unconscious habit transmitted by a corrupt, anti-life, mind-fearing culture, but because I freely choose to do so. I will in full awareness of the fact that, as affirmed by laws of physics established over centuries in response to the sacred human desire to acquire knowledge, the brisket will not pass itself. I will, not because I think you incapable of either rising from your chair and transporting yourself to a position from which you would be able to obtain the brisket yourself, or of extending your arm across the table to take hold of the platter from your current position, but, paradoxically, because you can do these things. You, who’re the apotheosis of heroic humanity, the completely free man, ask nothing from me and, for that reason, deserve to have the brisket passed to you by me. While the mass of men demand something for nothing, you offer everything: your energy, your attention, your consciousness, your mind, your existence. You are the only man on Earth to whom I would pass the brisket willingly and in full awareness of the meaning of that act.”
Taking hold of its elegant china platter, she passed him the brisket. Glatt used a pair of beautiful sterling silver tongs, a gift from a wealthy individual with excellent taste, to transfer several slices of the rich, delectable meat to his plate. He cut through the braised animal flesh and impaled it on the tines of a fork—efficiently, pitilessly. He tasted it, and a dark scowl formed on his face. He rang for the footman, who hurried in from the kitchen. “Pierre,” Glatt said contemptuously, “the brisket has gone cold.”
The footman took the platter and hurried off to the kitchen. Dispassionately eying a basket of dinner rolls, Glatt picked one up in his bare hands and began to eat it. “Oh, Dragnie, Dragnie,” he said. “How was your day?”
“Mine?” Dragnie exclaimed. It was not like Glatt to express an interest in her day; indeed, it was not like him to express an interest in any other person. His independence, his self-sufficiency, his supreme individuality were the character traits for which she most admired and despised him—and for which, she knew, she would willingly kill him and be his slave.
She became suddenly aware, with a deep certainty, that the pressures on Glatt, his responsibilities--not to others, for he had none, but to himself--were taking a toll, as they would on any man. Glatt not only functioned both as C.E.O. of Glatt Industries as well as its Top Breakthrough Inventor, but as Head Advisor of Governmental Bureaucracy Affairs for Economic Ideas for the federal government. The international situation had been deteriorating for some time; no wonder, Dragnie now thought, Glatt looked vexed. “My day was rather interesting,” she said. “In fact, I met a most extraordinary young man at the Glatt School—”
The butler silently entered the room, stopped before Glatt, and said, “Excuse me, sir, but three gentlemen are down in the lobby and insist on meeting with you.”
Glatt chuckled and made a gesture of impatience and mockery and contempt. “Who are they, Farnsworth?”
“Mr. Rawbone, Mr. De Soto, and Mr. Daghammarskjold.”
Glatt and Dragnie exchanged a look, a look of significance and meaning and shared visual contact.
“Send them up,” Glatt said.
Moments later, having ascended the 287 floors of the Johnsonwood Building in a streamlined supersonic elevator of Glatt’s invention, the trio where ushered into the apartment.
“Hello, John,” said Hunk Rawbone. “Hello, Dragnie.”
Dragnie chuckled and Glatt chuckled. That Rawbone had once been Dragnie’s lover was known to all present. Tall, handsome, with the muscular build of an athlete and the brilliant mind of a genius, Hunk Rawbone had founded Rawbone Metals and single-handedly invented the miracle metal Rawbonium. Stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum, cheaper than sand, one-hundred-percent gluten-free and packed with important vitamins and minerals, it had revolutionized the railroad industry, the aviation industry, and every other metal-using industry. There had been a time, ten years before, when its manufacture, distribution, and sale had been strictly regulated by the second-raters and me-too-ers and so’s-yer-old-man-ers of the national government, when the entire metals industry had been hobbled and bound and gagged by men like Francis Pissypants, the Bureaucrat-in-Chief, and J.B. Mucklicker, director of the National Board of Caution.
That, however, had been before John Glatt had convinced various businessmen to hide out in Wyoming, and brought the entire world to its knees. Now Hunk Rawbone was both President of Rawbone Industries and Head Business Person of the Department of Business.
“Hello, Hunk,” Dragnie said. She turned to their second visitor. “How are you, San?”
Sanfrancisco Nabisco Alcoa D’Lightful D’Lovely De Soto chuckled in a mischievous South American way, a way outwardly suggestive of lighthearted frivolity and consistent with his former but faked-up image as a feckless, womanizing and girlizing playboy but now openly proclaiming his absolute fidelity to a code of values that held that the mind was the supreme expression of man’s intellect. “I?” De Soto chuckled.
Like Dragnie, Sanfrancisco was a self-made man who had inherited an industrial empire. Handsome, brilliant, dashing, and with a certain dangerous but appealing Latino flair, he had become director, upon his father’s death, of the fabled De Soto Talc Mines. El Mino De Soto de Talco Incorporado was now the source of eighty-six percent of the world’s baby powder, which was daily administered to more than seventy-one percent of the world’s babies in both Natural and Springtime Fresh scents. “I am well, Dragnie,” he said with an amused twinkle.
“Well, I am fine, too, in case anyone cares!” joked Regnad Daghammarskjold.
“And what if we don’t?” chuckled De Soto.
“Well, then, you can go to hell!” rejoined the boisterous Swedish-American Swede to the chuckles of everyone else except the servants.
Dragnie pursed her lips in amusement as her eyes glittered with appreciation for his rascally personality. Handsome, blond, and attractively beautiful in a way that appealed to men as well as women, Regnad Daghammarskjold was a pirate. He spent most of his time aboard his ship, the Fjord Fusion, with his rollicking but deadly serious and often lethal band of beautiful blond fellow pirates, plundering merchant ships from other countries and pillaging the state-owned vessels for loot, swag, and booty. When not haunting the shipping lanes of the bounding main and asserting the supremacy of private theft and entrepreneurial swashbuckling over state-run maritime mediocrities, Regnad lived in a modest two-bedroom co-op in Murray Hill with his wife, Grace Adams, the beautiful movie star.
“Would any of you like a drink?” Dragnie asked.
“I would like a beer,” Regnad Daghammarskjold said. “Do you have any?”
“I don’t know,” Dragnie replied.
“You might,” the pirate said. “Look around. Check your premises, Dragnie.”
“Let me tell you something about beer,” Sanfrancisco De Soto said, his eyes blazing. Thirty-five minutes later, when he had concluded his discourse on the history, morality, and metaphysics of beer, Dragnie signaled for Pierre to bring three bottles. She handed them around. Each of the visitors gave her a ten-dollar bill. There was no need for anyone to thank anyone for anything. “I won’t insult you by offering you food,” Glatt said. “You are all perfectly capable of obtaining your own sustenance.”
“I know it,” Regnad said.
The group settled in the living room and Hunk Rawbone opened the discussion. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, John,” he said. “But Goa has fallen.”
“I didn’t know it,” Glatt said. “Goa be damned!”
“That’s the last one,” Sanfrancisco added. “Now every nation on earth has become a People’s State of the People.”
“Every nation—save one,” Dragnie murmured. “The United States.”
“Shall I tell you what the product safety boys are saying?” Rawbone asked out loud. “They’re saying that the People’s States’re complaining that our manufactured goods’re dangerous. They’re talking about an embargo.”
“Then we must meet with Mr. Jenkins,” Dragnie said. “We should also alert the boys in the Pentagon, our nation’s most brilliant scientist boys, and our leading achiever-boys in industry, research, and engineering.”
“This is serious, isn’t it, John?” Regnad said with unflinching directness.
“Yes,” Glatt replied.”
The three visitors had gone, and Dragnie and Glatt were preparing for bed, when Glatt mentioned their earlier topic of conversation. Standing in their elegant bedroom, clad in the simplest of pajamas whose clean design, quiet sense of style, and always-tasteful pizzazz made a striking statement of individuality wherever he went, he said, “You were telling me about an extraordinary young man you met today.”
Dragnie suppressed a smile of amusement. “It’s of no importance,” she said, and only afterwards, while falling asleep, did she ask herself if that were really true.
Chapter 4: The Veracity of Truth
Dragnie stood up from her austere, stoical desk, as if announcing to the world with a single decisive gesture that she had completed the work she had sat at it in order to accomplish. She allowed herself a brief chuckle of amusement at her achievement, followed by a contemptuous chuckle of mockery at the amused contemptuousness with which she regarded her own chuckling mockery, which was so amusing.
Tagbord Rail’s Southwest Division was expanding to her satisfaction. The augmented schedule of the Chimichanga Line in Arizona, linking to the Tamale-Caliente Line in New Mexico, would take some of the pressure off the trunk lines of the Enchiladas Suizas Line in Texas. The entire region was doing well. The economy of the Southwest had shown steady growth in the past ten years, as if that area’s system of production and trade among men had been a human being, eating right and staying fit and as a consequence becoming larger.
In fact, the economy of the entire U.S. had undergone a similar expansion over the same period, although not before what came to be called The Great Takeover. Until then, the government, controlled by Mr. Thomas and a small cadre of corrupt and physically-unattractive bureaucrats, had sought to maximize its power and safeguard its incompetence and mediocrity with laws mandating “fairness.”
No one was allowed to produce anything new. No one was allowed to use anything old. No one was allowed to accept a new job or quit their current job. No one was allowed to be a genius. No one was allowed to have fun or have nice things or go anywhere or do anything or go out or see their friends or anything.
John Glatt’s response to this state of affairs was to persuade society’s achievers to withdraw from humanity and hide in a valley in Wyoming. As many as twenty important tycoons abandoned their companies. Some even destroyed their factories, refineries, and warehouses with dynamite and fire, miraculously without injury or loss of life to anyone of importance. What had transpired then was what always happens when a corporation’s founder retires or dies: the companies went out of business. All that remained of the country’s economy ground to a halt.
Then Glatt hijacked the radio waves and made a three-hour speech about his view of the world, and the government—as governments invariably do, after being denounced in long, philosophical lectures--surrendered. The boys in Washington pleaded with Glatt to restore order. Mr. Thomas, convening a formal committee including such cowardly lapdogs and obsequious pontificating high-ups as Jason Bellybutton, the supposed economist; Dr. Cyrus Pussyface, the prevaricating expert; Professor Jones, the world-renowned person; and Secretary of Union Greed Mumph Slimetrail, importuned Glatt to take the reins of the economy and rescue it from disaster. Glatt refused. The government attempted to coerce him into cooperating but that, too, failed. Finally, it abdicated, and Glatt led his courageous, principled team of businessmen and classical music composers and actresses out of Glatt’s Gorge and back into the world.
Their first actions were swift and decisive. They fired Mr. Thomas and replaced him with the impotent puppet Mr. Jenkins. They then nullified every undemocratically-imposed edict and authoritarian-enforced regulation of the past twenty years, and supplanted them with rules supporting individual achievement. They repealed the Everybody Be Nice Act and replaced it with the Leave Business Alone Directive. They cancelled the Nobody Gets to Have More Than Anybody Else Act and instituted the Finders Keepers Losers Weepers Ruling. They reversed the If You Don’t Have Enough to Share With The Rest of the Class Then You Can Leave Those Cupcakes With Me And Collect Them At The End of The Day edict and, in its place, promulgated the This Is My Fudgesickle Go Get Your Own Law.
The results were immediate and profound. Everywhere, in every industry, millionaires went back to work. Useless regulators and corrupt bureaucrats committed mass suicide, publicly begged for forgiveness, or found themselves simply shot on sight. Labor unions, openly acknowledging the superior wisdom and unfailing justice of the marketplace, voluntarily disbanded after first publishing, in newspapers throughout the land, full-page advertisements apologizing to management for any inconvenience they had caused for the past one hundred years. Reality, as properly defined, resumed.
But now, Dragnie mused to her own private self as she began to walk toward her office door, a new enemy of freedom loomed: the consolidation of the People’s States of the People, whose cancerous collectivist malignancy had now spread to every nation on earth—save one.
“Miss Tagbord? A delivery for you.”
Miss Smith, her loyal and obedient secretary, stood in the doorway, an expression of open admiration obscured, on the face of her head, by an immense bouquet of vivid, luxuriant magenta orchids in a handsome cut-glass vase created by one of the city’s top vase designers. Dragnie suppressed a small smile at the inadvertent double meaning of the secretary’s announcement. The notion that she would ever take part in “a delivery,” and from the sacred and inviolable sanctity of her body’s individuality, bring forth another human being whose helplessness and weakness would subject her—at least according to society’s superstitious tribal standards—to years of unremunerated toil and slavish subservience, was literally inconceivable to the mentality of her mind.